Montana and back again

After spending 10 days in Montana, I've decided to graduate from Rice and head west. I don't care really were west, just west and with the mountains.

The trip to Montana with Wade, Jon, and Erin (all from Carleton) was the best trip ever. Erin's family is very kind and gracious letting us all stay a few nights and take a few showers. Words truly cannot describe this trip. If you've been anywhere like it, you know some of the feelings, but if you haven't, there is no way I can explain.

We backpacked our way through the Bob Marshall Wilderness for 5 days starting and ending at Holland Lake. We traveled up and in through Gordon Pass, then spent a day fishing at the pristine Koessler Lake. From Kessler we moved north spending an afternoon at Lena Lake on our way to the Necklace Lakes. A quick two our hike brought us down several thousand feet from the Necklace Lakes and back to our truck at Holland Lake. We then spent the next two days at Erin's amazing cabin on the Smith River fishing, grilling and enjoying some cold beers and good company.

The fishing throughout was incredible! I highly recomend fly fishing to anyone as it is far more exciting, challenging, and interesting than regular fishing. We all had a great time in The Bob wandering though pristine wilderness spending days at a lake with the whole place to ourselves. It was truly a magical experience and comunion with nature that I will never forget.

School is started and there is lots to do. Everything seems to be going great. More later.

Final Countdown

Crap... I just wrote a page of stuff, and clicked "back" to find it lost and gone forever.

Here is what I said book-a-minute stle:

Wow, the summer passed really fast. Brent and I have done a lot of work. I will miss working with him this next year.

I hope people find these updates about my work interesting because I almost dont. Sadly I dont do much else. I lied. I just don't want to write too much gossip online. I drink with buddies a lot. We find that Houston isn't a terrible city now that we are all 21. Lukes birthday was a lot of fun.

Funny story about walking to the bathroom and hearing housemates having loud sex upstairs.

It is too hot and too far to go climbing outside. Therefore I have been climbing a lot at the gym.

I strongly dislike packing for other than vacation. Funny question asking when to pack items like towel, George Forman grill, and other essentials.

I am going backpacking and climbing in Montana for a few weeks starting on Sunday with Wade and company.

Bye.

let the good times role

A lot of good work was accomplished this week. We obtained a vial full of nanotubes (its in a glass vial with a pointed bottom making it one of the most worthless containers of all time. So we store it in an old soda can to keep it from tipping over) and the spectrometer is quasi oporational. There has been plenty of code fixing to adjust for the new stepper motor in the spectrometer and the wavenumber (instead of wavelength) drive. The aquisition of a green laser today made it possible to properly align and calibrate the spectrometer gratings. All seems to be going right on track, we'll see if it comes together in time to collect any data before the end of the summer.

Last night was pretty wild. A coworker from the lab and mutual friend decided spur of the moment to go to the Astros game. However we missed the fact that it was $1 hot dog night and that Pedro Martinez (people who know say he's good) was pitching. So instead of the game, we just hit some bars downtown and watched it on TV. Fast forward to 1am: we are all blitzed and Greg is broke. There are some nice places down there with enough change in atmosphere and company that I'm sure it will lure be back during the coming year. However, those places are damn expensive - sorry ladies, until I get an income you'll be buying your own drinks.

So little time

I took off for a family reunion in the beautiful Traverse City area of Michigan on Thursday afternoon last week. It was great to get together with my family - its the first time we have all been in the same place for more than 24 hours in over 2 years! The lakeshore country is just gorgeous with the shallow and sandy bottomed waters giving a tropical appearance that contrasts with the quaint cross between a midwest softness and east coast white picket fence feel. All in all a sucessfull weekend.

On the way to Michigan I finished the book "Freakonomics." A quick 250 page read full of an interesting and diverse set of questions followed by number crunching economic analysis. I learned some good stuff, like how to sell my home for a good price and words and writing styles to avoid and use in personal adds. More than anything its a great demonstration of the power of incentives. On the way back from Michigan I put down another 100 pages or so of "From Beruit to Jerusalem." Thats a lot harder of a read but quite enlitening on its subject (the modern history of the middle east).

I missed a lot at work in the day and a half that I missed. I think I've made up my time with two 11 hour days in a row and more on the horizon. Its really exciting now that my research companion and I are becoming more independant from our advisor and are really on the verge of getting some data collected. We've got a long way to go, but we have all the pieces in place so that if we tweak everything just perfectly, we might be able to get some results. I'm doing my best to learn how to code in LabVIEW and align diffraction gratings. So much to do!

On productivity in a Lab

Working in a lab is a truly remarkable experience. I am quickly becoming obsessed with my work and find myself reading miscalaneous physics texts and pondering about the experiment quite often during my free time. There is just so much work to do and so many interesting things to learn and aparatus to improve and things to fix.

This week, although its only Tuesday, has already been extremely productive and exciting. For the first time, I get the feeling that we are making progress and that all the work we are doing is really leading towards something exciting and new!

Yesterday we oppened up our spectrometer to make sure everything was working properly. Although it is a simple device - two mirrors and a diffraction grating - it is truly amazing to see. I love the look of pristene optics. The mirrors so perfectly reflect the light upon the deceptively smoothe diffraction grating (it really has approximatley 1200 grooves/cm) which can be rotated such that it projects the desired wavlength (down to the angstrome) onto the second mirror which directs the light out a final adjustable slit onto a detector. Absolutely amazing to see. We spent the rest of the day yesterday and today trying to assure the calibration of the spectrometer and coordinate its actions with the horrendous piece of labview code that runs the entire aparatus (laser grating, autotracking system, spectrometer).

Much progress has been made in understanding the code. Though there are may mysteries and secrets of the code lost with graduated grad students, we learned enough to add one more layer of fudging to the code and make it work for today. As with everyone that has come before us, we are leaving the rewriting and consolodation of the code (as well as translation to a new computer and hardware) to some poor smuck in the future (probably me...).

After a quick pizza dinner in the office, we managed to track down our advisor and coerce him into cleaning off our nanotube experimentation table. The table was piled literaly three feet high over the majority of the surface and then cascading down into a delta of valves, gauges, old motor parts and boxes on the floor. Unattended flat surfaces have a way of dissapearing in our lab. Carter, our advisor, picked through each piece of the pile with exclamations of "Oh! These are great! If I ever need a standard 8 pin to 3 pin lamp adapter, this would be a treasure! But I rarely do..." As he worked his way through hundreds of these things, Brent (my coworker) and I climbed to the topmost shelves (a good 20 feet up) and stooped to the bottommost drawers to put away as much stuff as we could. So our project is comeing along! We will hoist our new spectrometer into place tommorow before the fresh space dissapears once again.

As this post is already far too long, I'll conclude: there is so much to be done at the lab and in life, I'm truly excited! I'm off to Michigan this weekend for a family reunion.

Covert Ops

Brief research update: More of the same really. Progress is slower than it should be as me and my research companion are left to read thesis and quasi related texts all day while we wait for some expert advise (our expert advisor is usually busy). We are on the verge of collecting useful Raman data from the ozone and thus on the verge of starting the construction of the new part of our apparatus (nanotube holder and spectrometer). So I've been working on learning some coding skills (labview and python) and then just reading of physics texts in hopes of prepping for the GRE a little.

So I've been climbing pretty hard lately. Sadly its only in the gym. But hey, climbing is climbing. I've been doing a lot more bouldering (low to the ground without a rope) lately. Its a lot more of an anerobic strength work out. I find myself just dog tired for a day or two after a hard bouldering session. It feels great! I really feel that I'm getting a lot stronger. Its hard to see any results as far as climbing harder grades since the grading is so flakey (particularly in the gym).

So this post as you can see has nothing to do with covert ops. It just seemed like a cool title to get people interested.

Tubing

Yesterday, I went tubing with some folks from the REU, out on the Comel River half way between San Antonio and Austin. This is deffinately something to try when you are in Texas. It captures the spirit of Texas so well. The scene is a cross between trashy, toursity, Mexican beach and a ranchy/Texas feel. There are numerous little shops from which you can rent tubes and coolers. We rented some tubes and proceeded to float on.

The Hill Country of Texas is full of mid sized spring fed rivers. It is as though these rivers were created solely to have people tube. As with everything Texas you have your beer. More specifically, you have a tube for your cooler full of beer, because what goes better with a sun burn than cold beer?

After several painful hours of only evangelical and country radio stations, we arrived.

Most of the property along the river is privately owned with only a few public access points. So we floated down through a public tube schute (like a waterslide built into the river), and then missed the next schute and ended up all getting tipped over in a mini waterfall. I bet we looked pretty goofy trying to stand up while holding onto our tubes, hats, shoes, and beer. I was surprised at the swimmers that just waited to pick up lost items for themselves (including our beer!).

After the brief excitment, it was a lazy float for the next hour down the river until the exit. The most surprising thing to me was the group that brought a boombox to float down the river with!

In the end, it felt excessively comercialized, but quite the experience. I'd recomend bringing your own tubes and plenty of water to drink. Also, I'd recomend dinner at the nearby restaraunt, "the Grismill." Its a great place in a really quaint historic town.

Other than a bit of slacklining, that about captures all the excitment of the weekend.

Its all in the shoes

I've started to run a lot more lately. I usually don't like running, but lately, I find myself enjoying the time to myself running and the great feeling of finishing. However, my shoes are pretty old. I've put some serious mileage into these Nike's, not to mention hours of tennis, raquetball and all sorts of other stuff that one shouldn't do with a running shoe.

The other day, I went to Accademy sports to try on some shoes. I tried on the Nike Free 5.0. Nice shoe, but a bit hard to slip on and off... maybe I needed a bigger size. Oh well, they have mixed reviews anyway.

So this morning I went to the New Balance store. The people there seemed to know their stuff - they watched me walk barefoot and could tell what kind of shoe I needed. I did a little research online. Appearently there are several styles of shoe depending on the type of foot you have. They are called cushoning, motion control, and stability. I have a pretty normal foot so I got the cushioning. Flat footed people need the stability and duck or pigeon footed people need the motion control.

So I bought a pair of shoes and didn't feel bad paying $6 more for the expert advice. I then proceeded to go on a 40 minute run when I got home. Its all in the shoes.

overtime

Things are finally shaping up. The excimer laser is in a quasi stable and working condition (any further repairs and cleaning are beyond the scope of this summer), I have become fairly proficcient at aligning the internal optics of the dye laser and achieving a quite reasonable power despite all the systems flaws.

Next comes the most complicated portion of the experiment, everything else. At this point the whole process changes skills completely from a mechanical tinkering and plumbing fixes to power supplies, circuits, scopes, and computer programs. I'm not yet a labview convert - it looks quite pretty but there is just something intrinsically unnerving about programming without a keyboard (entirely drag and drop)...

Finding the signals and sorting out the timing is an incredible task. Its really testing my ability to use a scope profficiently - I thought I was alright during phys 221 and 331, but this is a whole new level of noise polution and signal hunting.

After arriving to work at 9:30am on 6.5 hours of sleep, I figured 7:30pm on a friday was a good time to leave. Sadly, I still haven't managed to collect a signal yet or even use all the wonderful ozone that I created and have been keeping since earlier this week. In attempt to put down my frustration at lack of actual progress, I look instead at all the parts of the experimental apparatus I can opporate and start up "quickly." It only takes the morning to set up and usually fix the excimer laser, align the dye laser, and create ozone. Not much to show for 4 weeks worth of work, but the word from on high is that this is the hard part, that its all the same set up and just a quick switch of the target in the end.

Potential for greatness

After a 30 minute morning run, breakfast, shower, and then 1 hour nap, I'm convinced that this is the way to start the day. But before I digress on the perfect lifestyle, let me first talk about the awesome progress in the lab!

The excimer laser we are using is rather old. As old as I am. Thus it has many issues. During its hay day, it was quite the laser. It had automatic and internal gas handling, a nickel plated inner chamber and a nifty LED display letting you control the laser with the press of a button. Since then, its decayed quite a bit until it reached its current state.

The nickel coating inside the gas chamber has erroded away so now the HCl and plenty of contaminants absorb readily into the chamber walls. The automatic gas handling system was corroaded by the HCl and now has an all manual external plumbing system. It still gets the job done. It just takes a little TLC.

To clean the laser of all the gas contaminants, we circulate the gas around a liquid nitrogen filled dewar (around 90 K) to condense out all the contaminats such as water. However, it also takes all our Xe ad HCl out of the system as well. Thus we clean and give it a fresh fill of Xe, He, and HCl. So after a few weeks of tinkering with all the plumbing (read fixing leaks), and playing with the dye laser and following optics, we are finally fresh filled today. We have some awesome power now. I put a piece of tape on my finger and let it dangle in front of the laser beam and I could feel the vibrations. I'm a believer that light has momentum!

Interesting Books

As with all things in life, I start with much enthusiasm. Let me run with this blog as far as I can before tireing and dropping this new habbit.

Summer is great. I really enjoy the random nature of my studies. I am of the opinion that everything one learns is useful and applicable but reading and learning by themselves are of no value. The value lies in the application. That said, I enjoy the seemingly sparadic readings of the summer.

My books of the summer so far are: "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond, "Blink" by Malcom Gladwell, and "Emotions Revealed" by Paul Ekman. I highly recomend all three books. My two line book reviews won't do any of these titles justice, so read the reviews online elsewhere. I will say that as interesting as the content, I loved the style of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and hope to emulate its well constructed arguments in my future writings. "Blink" was a fast read (I read it in one day on the planes back to TX), and seemed to loose focus by the end, or perhaps I did after several flights. I just couldn't tell if it was trying to argue something, or just be observations or really what the purpose turned out to be other than some insight into how the mind works and thinks. From "Blink" I found the author Paul Ekman. His book is "Emotions Revealed" is an intersting book. I felt bogged down by excessive discussion of emotions, their sources and all sorts of other speculations and research findings as I was most interested in what I see as the most important contet of the book, learning to read the universal expressions of emotions that people display on their faces. I greatly improved my abilties after completing the book. I think he sells some software to train yourself, but the book is free from a library.

My Summer Job

So, I started this summer with a poor idea of what I was to be researching and an even poorer conception of how I was going to go about actually doing it.

In simpler terms, my project begins with developing a democratic means of identifying carbon nanotubes. In the lon tem the project will develop more to studying the chemisty of the nanotubes. The research results will hopefully be of use by Smalley and his group as the quest on to produce, cut, grow, and spin the nanotubes into the magic material of our future.

A brief digression on carbon nanotubes:
Best of luck getting a good introuction to carbon nanotubes by google. What follows is a basic introduction but understand that there is so much more that is truly fascinating. Carbon nanotubes are essentially a strectched bucky ball (C_60). To make a good model, draw on a sheet of paper an interconnected mesh of hexagons. This two dimensional representation is called the "graphene sheet" and is the starting point for all the carbon nanotube theory. A nanotube is made by choosing two points and rolling the sheet so those two points connect. Through a simple means of numbering we can identify a nanotube by two vectores (n,m). These vectors determine the nanotubes chirality (description of its symetry) and a plethora of other properties. There are two particularly important species of nanotube: the armchair and zig-zag nanotubes. Thier importance arises from their achirality (actually being very very symetric istead of a degree of asymetry) and their physical properties such as high strength and conductivity. Armchair tubes have n=m so (n,n) is a armchair; zig-zag tubes have m=0 so (n,0) is a zig-zag tube.


Dr. Wiessman and others in the Center for Nanoscale Scence and Technology (CNST) at Rice, developed an ingenious method to identify many kinds of nanotubes via IR florescence. However, IR spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy are an interesting balance. In general, a molecule that gives off lots of IR florescene gives reletively little raman signal and visa versa. The Wiessman group method is very fast and effective for most tubes, but not the armchair or zig-zag. My project aims to use UV Raman spectroscopy to measure the vibrational breathing modes of the nanotubes. Each different nanotube should have a characteristic Raman signal.

At least thats what I think I am aiming to do.

Currently, I am working to make sure that the experimental setup is working up to a known level of efficiency and accuracy. This is achieved by recreating the results of Erik Lotfi, a recently graduated graduate student of the Kinsey Lab group. His experiment was to look at the Dissociative Resonance Raman Spectra of ozone. This is the study of the physical processes that occur in the upper atomosphere as the ozone layer protects us from the UV rays of the Sun.

The experimental set up is as follows: an eximer laser to pump a tunable dye laser (this set up gives us the flexibilty to choose precisely our wavelengths), then an optical set up that uses a Beta - Barriam Borate crystal to double the frequency of the light (interesting physics in that!). Beyond that is all details of sample holders and computer data aquisistion.

I'll add more to this blog about developments in my experiment and further explanations as they develop.

call me a flip flop... someday

So this blog account was originally created for the purpose of posting on other people's accounts. However, upon reading other people's blogs, I realized their utility and was forced to reconsider my originally negative opinions of blogs. So I'll state the purpose of this blog as the means by which to chronical my summer and life happenings so that friends and (potentially) family can read up on the latest breaking news from my life. Undoubtedly that purpose will change over time, but until it does, enjoy a quailty blog.