I don't want to say anything here that I will regret. I don't want to stand up and declare "I am done with academia! No more!" and then be embarrassed by that someday, when I'm feeling less disillusioned and less scared, and am after all applying for professorial jobs. And, of course, I don't want any potential employer to find out I've written anything like that.
But I don't think professorial jobs are the ones I will be applying for when I finish grad school. I'll try to summarize the reasons why not. What's a blog for if not working through your angst? And maybe there are some insights to be had from my experience, who knows?
I didn't start my college career dreaming of being a professor. That was an ambition I picked up as an undergraduate, which is probably when most people who become professors decide that's what they want to be... As an undergrad, you're being exposed to all of these new ideas. It's a thrill. If you're lucky enough to go to a small teaching institution like I did (The University of Puget Sound), you're talking about all of these ideas with your professors. You want to keep talking about exciting, important ideas, to keep making discoveries, to contribute something to humanity. And the way to do that seems to be, become a professor. Because they're right there with you, having these conversations, only getting paid for it. Only it's even better for them, because they're experts, with the respect and attention of everyone else in the conversation...
And then, if you're lucky enough to go to a small teaching school, you sometimes get invited over to their houses (beautiful! Hardwood floors, views of the Sound and the mountains, basement workshops, cute families) and even out on their boat (thanks, Professor Thorndike!). And they travel. Take sabbaticals! Who wouldn't want that? It looks like a dream job. And to get it, you think, all you have to do is stay in school. Undergraduate you doesn't mind that idea at all. You're good at school. And it's a lot less scary than the idea of getting a "real job". You wouldn't even know where to begin to find one of those. And besides, you now realize college hasn't really trained you for a real job (unless you majored in business). Maybe you thought vaguely that you would be a "scholar" or a "philosopher" or a "scientist," but now it starts to sink in that all of those words are just synonyms for "professor." The idea of wasting all that education on an office job, coming home every night to your own empty apartment (assuming you're not married or engaged by the end of college) and no guarentee that there will ever be more... Well, it's depressing. And besides all of that, if you're a scientist, they offer to pay you to go to school! Not a lot by your parents' standards, but more money than you've ever made, more than you've had to live on for the last four years. So you start applying for grad school, and on all your grad school application essays, you say that you want to be a professor, and have a view of the mountains, and make important, meaningful discoveries and contribute to humanity. And you do want that.
So what could possibly have changed in three years that this no longer sounds like a dream come true?
Well, I guess it does still sound like a dream come true, in the same way that winning the lottery does. But I have come to realize that saying "I want to be a professor like the ones I had at Puget Sound" is only a little more realistic than saying "I want to win the lottery when I grow up." As an undergraduate at a place like that, you have a skewed sample set. Every person you meet who went to grad school, also has a faculty position. But as a graduate student, you meet all of the people who didn't get that golden ticket. You meet some people pushing forty who are still grad students (and some who have dropped out after spending ten years of their life in grad school, with nothing to show for it.) You meet post docs, who have earned their PhDs and make a little more money than you do, but who are basically still doing what grad students do: low status lab work, taking orders and sometimes abuse from their faculty advisors, often living in dorms. They are on temporary five or three or one year contracts. After that they are on their own again. You eventually find that you know some unemployed post docs. You meet "adjunct professors," "visiting professors," and "research faculty." These people are older than the post docs, in their forties and fifties and even sixties, but they too are on temporary contracts, which you think must make it hard to have kids or buy a house or even a car. How can they know what they'll be able to afford in five years, after their current employment has ended? You realize that many of them don't have those things, houses or cars or families. You meet tenure track professors who are then denied tenure, which is to say, fired, and the houses and cars and families in which they recklessly invested are now in jeopardy. You come to realize that even the professors who get tenure still have little real job security. Part of their salary comes from research grants which they are expected to get (mostly from the government.) These grants are highly competitive, and are awarded for one or three or five years...
You realize that in all this cut-throat competition for jobs and grants, the ones who succeed aren't necessarily the ones who deserve to succeed. The people who make the hiring decisions and give the grants aren't usually experts in the fields the research is in. So they have two things to rely on, when making these decisions: the applicants' own claims about themselves and their research, and the applicants' record of publications in various journals. So the people who are the most arrogant, the most self-promoting, the most prone to exaggeration and incomprehensible jargon... They win. Assuming they have also published a lot of papers, at least. Hence the phrase "publish or perish". So it's the stressed out, frantic, intensely career oriented, arrogant self-promoters who actually win. Do you really want to be like them?
Worse, you see the incentives to exaggerate the importance of one's research, to make bigger claims for its potential applications than it really warrents. To make it sound more impressive and more successful than it is. And you begin working on research of your own, which you realize cannot possibly live up to the claims made for it in the funding applications. If you are a scientist, you learn that science is hard. That most ambitious projects aren't going to succeed, at least in the short term, because that's what "hard" means. The better you understand your field, and other people's research in it, the more skeptical you get. You don't feel like you are contributing anything signficant to humanity after all. You feel like a fraud. And you suspect that some of the other people in your field, making even bigger claims, are frauds too.
The transition from coddled undergraduate at a teaching institution (a paying customer) to cheap labor at a research institution is a rude awakening generally, for ambitious and academically talented students. Your education is no longer about taking classes, certainly not after the first year. It is more like an apprenticeship. But there are few protections in place for you. If your advisor wants you to work nights and weekends, and you really think they might punish you for refusal in any of the hundreds of ways available to them -- assigning you to meaningless and tedious tasks, grading you harshly in their classes, declining to put your name on papers summarizing your groups' research, even failing you on your qualifying exams or thesis proposal (or simply failing to schedule them), or refusing to graduate you, or refusing to give references and recommendations if you do graduate -- then you'd better work nights and weekends. No overtime pay. (Not that my advisor has punished anyone in any of these ways. But the fact that the potential exists is oppressive enough to make it hard to object to anything he asks us to do.) In grad school, you are not made to feel special. You are not made to feel like a smart person with a lot of potential. You are now (especially when you first start your research) the stupidest person in the room, the lowest person on the totem poll. The things you are asked to do seem impossible. You get used to failure. The ambitions that motivated you as an undergraduate now seem unachievable.
Finally, if you have met someone, if you are no longer facing the prospect of a lonely studio apartment after graduation, you start to wonder how you're going to make it work. You are twenty-five or twenty-eight or thirty years old. Your parents had a kid or three by this age. If your significant other is also in academia (and if you met them in grad school, the odds are good that they are) then you faced the two body problem. Getting any kind of permanent position seems impossible, but getting two in the same state, much less the same city? If you take temporary positions, what are you going to do when one of them ends and the other does not? It seems you will have prioritize. How important is this academic career to you after all, after everything you've seen? Now that you've lost your illusions?
Paints a pretty depressing picture, doesn't it?
Well, that picture is an illusion too, to some extent. Things have been getting better, this past year or so. I am not so new, anymore, and I no longer feel like stupidest person in the room, for starters. I feel more confident about the work that I'm doing, confident of my own abilities. I have gotten over some of my disappointment with the gap between the claims people make and what research can actually achieve. Anyway, not everything fails. some useful stuff does come out of this kind of research. A lot of people do find ways to make families work. The job market is tough, but not necessarily any tougher than the one my mom faced with her law degree, for instance. Making two careers and a family work is difficult for anyone, in any job, and you do have to make sacrifices, but you don't have to sacrifice either one completely.
Finally, and this is an important one for me to remember, because I often lose sight of it in my worry about the future... My life right now does not suck. I have a great apartment near the lake in one of the best cities in the world. My job, while stressful and hard on the ego and low paying and distressingly temporary, is also mentally challenging, with flexible hours, and not what you would call a dead end. I expect to make quite a bit more, not too far in the future, regardless of whether I stay in academia or not. Even post docs make twice what we're paid now, and more than the national average wage. And, of course, I'm married to an amazing guy. I already have a family. Just because we'd like to make it bigger some day doesn't mean it's not happy now. And furthermore, I have wonderful parents and siblings. And great in-laws. And I've been to Hawaii and Europe in the past two years. So really, I need to quit whining and start enjoying it, right?
But taking all of that into account, trying to keep everything in perspective... I think I'd rather go into industry than academia after this. The prospects for job security are better. There is (I hope!) less direct competition with your colleagues, less "publish or perish" pressure, less risk of perishing, in general. And I have been humbled by this experience so that I no longer look at abstract "contributions to mankind" as the only worthwhile thing to do with one's life. I think I would now like to do something a little less grandiose and a little more useful. Like designing products that people actually want. If the justification for doing science is that its discoveries allows us to develop new technologies which then make people's lives better... Well, I wouldn't mind being involved in the developing new technologies part, instead of the discoveries part. There just aren't enough significant "discoveries" out there to really support all of the people who want to make them, anyway.
Of course, that's only part of the justification for doing science. The other part has to do with the value of understanding for its own sake. But I feel like, in a weird way, I now know enough about the universe. I know calculus and quantum mechanics and a bit of particle physics (quantum field theory) and once I've learned a bit more relativity (this winter, hopefully) I will have satisfied the curiosity that led me to major in physics in the first place. As much as I'm likely to really satisfy it, anyway. Unless significant new insights, on par with relativity or quantum mechanics, are found in my lifetime. Odds are they won't be. They're pretty rare, in human history. Odds are I wouldn't be the one of the find them, if they were found. And even if I were likely to find such insights, other people would be equally capable. Things like this are usually discovered independently a couple of times. I'll let them have the fun... Generous, of me, right? If such a revolution happens, there will be nothing to stop me from reading a few papers on it even if I'm not in academia at the time. And nothing to guarentee I'd understand them, even if I were.
And who knows, maybe one day when I'm sitting at the computer designing lenses or lasers or whatever, inspiration will strike. Einstein was a patent clerk, wasn't he?
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Chicago: City of the Future
In "I, Robot" they had a great computer generated future skyline for Chicago, but this guy has them beat: his computer models show buildings which are actually under construction, or whose construction has been approved. Particularly stunning:
The skyline at sunset, from the lake
That central peak is the still hypothetical Fordham Spire, which appears in close up here.
Here's a daytime view of the skyline.
And another, with stronger shadows.
The view from an expensive condo building.
The view of an expensive condo building, specifically, Trump Tower, which is about eight floors high right now.
There's a lot of new construction going on in Chicago right now, much of it shown in those skylines, which I haven't identified. The city is in a sort of renassaince. Cranes everywhere. The Fordham Spire is certainly the most inspired, though. Check out these artists' impressions from the Sun Times. Breathtaking.
Close runner up is the much smaller Aqua. That's a brochure to day dream over...
Some of the new construction is sponsored by the city itself. For instance, the peerless Millennium Park. And Daley famously bulldozed an airport in the middle of the night to put another park in its place. He's been planting gardens on public land and encouraging green roofs.
And by the way, he wants to bring the Olympics to Chicago, building a temporary stadium and revitalizing the south lakefront in the process.
I believe Daley is the definition of "benevolent dictator." What can you do?
Chicago is my favorite big city, and I've been to quite a few. It's so much fun to see it grow, right before my eyes... And still retain its unique character, become even more itself. Daley is like a symbol of that. Chicagoans love him, because they love Chicago.
The skyline at sunset, from the lake
That central peak is the still hypothetical Fordham Spire, which appears in close up here.
Here's a daytime view of the skyline.
And another, with stronger shadows.
The view from an expensive condo building.
The view of an expensive condo building, specifically, Trump Tower, which is about eight floors high right now.
There's a lot of new construction going on in Chicago right now, much of it shown in those skylines, which I haven't identified. The city is in a sort of renassaince. Cranes everywhere. The Fordham Spire is certainly the most inspired, though. Check out these artists' impressions from the Sun Times. Breathtaking.
Close runner up is the much smaller Aqua. That's a brochure to day dream over...
Some of the new construction is sponsored by the city itself. For instance, the peerless Millennium Park. And Daley famously bulldozed an airport in the middle of the night to put another park in its place. He's been planting gardens on public land and encouraging green roofs.
And by the way, he wants to bring the Olympics to Chicago, building a temporary stadium and revitalizing the south lakefront in the process.
I believe Daley is the definition of "benevolent dictator." What can you do?
Chicago is my favorite big city, and I've been to quite a few. It's so much fun to see it grow, right before my eyes... And still retain its unique character, become even more itself. Daley is like a symbol of that. Chicagoans love him, because they love Chicago.
Monday, July 10, 2006
July Poem
Nationality
I have grown past hate and bitterness,
I see the world as one;
But though I can no longer hate,
My son is still my son.
All men at God's round table sit,
and all men must be fed;
But this loaf in my hand,
This loaf is my son's bread.
Dame Mary Gilmore
Because I'm not quite done thinking about patriotism, even though the holiday is over.
She's Australian. I thought I ought to find some poets who weren't American or British. She was a socialist who tried to help found an ideal communist community in Paraguay. Now she appears on the Australian $10 bill. That would not happen here.
Here's a little bio.
I also wanted to link to a post of Jaquandor's that I thought made some very good points, about how being disappointed in a person, or a nation, doesn't mean you don't love them; you can only be truly disappointed in those you do love.
I have grown past hate and bitterness,
I see the world as one;
But though I can no longer hate,
My son is still my son.
All men at God's round table sit,
and all men must be fed;
But this loaf in my hand,
This loaf is my son's bread.
Dame Mary Gilmore
Because I'm not quite done thinking about patriotism, even though the holiday is over.
She's Australian. I thought I ought to find some poets who weren't American or British. She was a socialist who tried to help found an ideal communist community in Paraguay. Now she appears on the Australian $10 bill. That would not happen here.
Here's a little bio.
I also wanted to link to a post of Jaquandor's that I thought made some very good points, about how being disappointed in a person, or a nation, doesn't mean you don't love them; you can only be truly disappointed in those you do love.
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Americana
So much celebrating!
We had a four day weekend -- now I'm looking forward to the coming weekend to recover from it.
Sunday, we gave Simon a tour of Chicago. You know Simon; he comments here sometimes. He'd been for a river tour that morning, and then came up on the El to meet us for Giordano's. You could see from his expression that he'd never had a Chicago style pizza before.
We showed him around the lab, and hiked over to the Metra for a super-swift (compared to the El) ride downtown. Then we all walked down Madison St. to Millenium Park. He seemed as fascinated by the bean and the band shell as everyone else, and we didn't warn him about the faces on the Crown fountain's impolite habit of spitting at people, so the spray took him by surprise. Then we wandered into Taste of Chicago, stayed just long enough to buy drinks and pick our way through the crowd for some country-music star, with a peak at Buckingham fountain and the lake, and made our way back up Michigan Ave. along the Magnificent Mile to the Hancock building, which is much better for going up than the Sears Tower.
Sunday was July 3rd, the day of our local community festival and fireworks. We saw jugglers, stilt walkers, magicians, and tumblers (the Jesse White Tumblers, to be precise, named after their sponsor, the Illinois secretary of state. Their tricks and flips and trampoline launches took them so high into the air that just watching gave us vertigo.) Ken got dogs from a hot dog stand, and I bought a toy that lights up and spins -- which I'm still playing with three days later, and everyone at the lab loved it too. Then the fireworks. What can you say about fireworks, besides "Ooh... Ahh!" They had some kinds we'd never seen before.
July 4th, we went to our neighboring community's parade. Everybody marched in this parade. Here's a sample from the program. (Yes, this parade had a program.)
58 North Suburban Peace Initiative (they were probably one of the chanting groups with "Down with Bush" signs.)
58a Warriors Drum and Bugle Corps
59 FAAM Youth Basketball Program
60 Amnesty International
61 St. Mark's Episcopal Church
62 Illinois Council Against Handguns and Brady Campaign / Million Mom March
63 Circ Estem and the Chicago Youth Circus (they rolled in on giant hamster wheel things, one person on the top, one person in the bottom)
64 Maxwell St. Klezmer band (tied for best music with the Cavaliers Drum and Bugle Corps, number 119.)
65 Women's Club of Evanston
66 Copia Records, Inc (apparently a hip hop label, featuring live rap and some awesome dancers.)
All in all, there were a hundred and twenty-something groups, including late entries like Senator Dick Durbin. Local business, political candidates and parties -- yes, both parties, but the Democrats got a lot more cheers. Also some military groups (U.S. Army recruiter, American Legion, and Bernard H. Baum, Brigadier Gen. (Ret.) marching all by himself), football teams, a drag racing club, a penny-farthing bicycle club, the Windy City Miata club, antique fire engines, a clown, a calliope, two bagpipe bands, Indonesian Performing Arts of Chicago (they were good!), and the Lawndale Lawnmowers Precision Drill and Marching Brigade. Yes, with lawnmowers. And a lot more that I can't really describe, but they were fantastic.
What flag waving Republicans need to realize is that the flag stands for all of that. The hip hop label, the peace protestors, the drag racers, and the gay and lesbian group that was sitting in front of us, with both American flags and rainbow flags on their lawnchairs. And this is the way to respect and celebrate it -- with a gigantic party!
They can't claim the flag for themselves. They can't tame the flag. They shouldn't try.
After the parade all that remained was more fireworks. We got the best spot in the house, closer than I've ever been before. Had to look straight up to see them, filling the whole sky. And while they didn't have as many crazy varieties as the ones the night before, they did have quantity!
What else can you say about fireworks? Here's the best description I can give you:
Happy 4th of July!
Don't forget to watch Master of Champions tonight!
We had a four day weekend -- now I'm looking forward to the coming weekend to recover from it.
Sunday, we gave Simon a tour of Chicago. You know Simon; he comments here sometimes. He'd been for a river tour that morning, and then came up on the El to meet us for Giordano's. You could see from his expression that he'd never had a Chicago style pizza before.
We showed him around the lab, and hiked over to the Metra for a super-swift (compared to the El) ride downtown. Then we all walked down Madison St. to Millenium Park. He seemed as fascinated by the bean and the band shell as everyone else, and we didn't warn him about the faces on the Crown fountain's impolite habit of spitting at people, so the spray took him by surprise. Then we wandered into Taste of Chicago, stayed just long enough to buy drinks and pick our way through the crowd for some country-music star, with a peak at Buckingham fountain and the lake, and made our way back up Michigan Ave. along the Magnificent Mile to the Hancock building, which is much better for going up than the Sears Tower.
Sunday was July 3rd, the day of our local community festival and fireworks. We saw jugglers, stilt walkers, magicians, and tumblers (the Jesse White Tumblers, to be precise, named after their sponsor, the Illinois secretary of state. Their tricks and flips and trampoline launches took them so high into the air that just watching gave us vertigo.) Ken got dogs from a hot dog stand, and I bought a toy that lights up and spins -- which I'm still playing with three days later, and everyone at the lab loved it too. Then the fireworks. What can you say about fireworks, besides "Ooh... Ahh!" They had some kinds we'd never seen before.
July 4th, we went to our neighboring community's parade. Everybody marched in this parade. Here's a sample from the program. (Yes, this parade had a program.)
58 North Suburban Peace Initiative (they were probably one of the chanting groups with "Down with Bush" signs.)
58a Warriors Drum and Bugle Corps
59 FAAM Youth Basketball Program
60 Amnesty International
61 St. Mark's Episcopal Church
62 Illinois Council Against Handguns and Brady Campaign / Million Mom March
63 Circ Estem and the Chicago Youth Circus (they rolled in on giant hamster wheel things, one person on the top, one person in the bottom)
64 Maxwell St. Klezmer band (tied for best music with the Cavaliers Drum and Bugle Corps, number 119.)
65 Women's Club of Evanston
66 Copia Records, Inc (apparently a hip hop label, featuring live rap and some awesome dancers.)
All in all, there were a hundred and twenty-something groups, including late entries like Senator Dick Durbin. Local business, political candidates and parties -- yes, both parties, but the Democrats got a lot more cheers. Also some military groups (U.S. Army recruiter, American Legion, and Bernard H. Baum, Brigadier Gen. (Ret.) marching all by himself), football teams, a drag racing club, a penny-farthing bicycle club, the Windy City Miata club, antique fire engines, a clown, a calliope, two bagpipe bands, Indonesian Performing Arts of Chicago (they were good!), and the Lawndale Lawnmowers Precision Drill and Marching Brigade. Yes, with lawnmowers. And a lot more that I can't really describe, but they were fantastic.
What flag waving Republicans need to realize is that the flag stands for all of that. The hip hop label, the peace protestors, the drag racers, and the gay and lesbian group that was sitting in front of us, with both American flags and rainbow flags on their lawnchairs. And this is the way to respect and celebrate it -- with a gigantic party!
They can't claim the flag for themselves. They can't tame the flag. They shouldn't try.
After the parade all that remained was more fireworks. We got the best spot in the house, closer than I've ever been before. Had to look straight up to see them, filling the whole sky. And while they didn't have as many crazy varieties as the ones the night before, they did have quantity!
What else can you say about fireworks? Here's the best description I can give you:
Happy 4th of July!
Don't forget to watch Master of Champions tonight!
Monday, June 26, 2006
Why God Made Television
If you were from the past, and I told you that I had invented a technology which would allow you to watch people do things long after the event, and far away from it, what would you want to watch?
Surely the same things people have always loved to watch: Acrobats! Jugglers! Dancers and daredevils! Spectacle!
For some reason, American television hasn't really gone this route. Circuses remain popular in this country as they have been throughout history... (Ken and I saw the Greatest Show on Earth last year, featuring the amazing Sylvia Zerbini and Crazy Wilson. I've had those pages bookmarked for a long time now, waiting for a blog post I could work them into.) Do television producers here think this stuff won't sell on TV? But it does in other countries! For that matter, it does fine in this country on the Spanish language channels. And what do you think professional wrestling is, really, besides wildly successful? And then there are stunt-based reality shows like Fear Factor. And, prosaic by comparison, all of the different talent shows, from Star Search to whatever this new Simon Cowell thing is to "Ice Skating with Celebrities" or whatever it's called.
But the country best known for pushing the limits of the ridiculous is Japan, and it is from Japan that the concept for the purest spectacle on American television comes:
Master of Champions. You've got to love it for the name alone.
The format is, weirdly enough, almost exactly like "Iron Chef." Three judges (including Oksana Baiul!) and inappropriate sports-caster commentary from confused hosts (one of whom is apparently married to the White Sox's Scott Podsednik.) Only there are more competitors, and the judges don't really get to choose the winners. They -- look, don't try to understand it. How the winner is chosen really doesn't matter. They're all champions.
The series premiere started with people doing donuts in their cars around a block of cheese. There was a cheese grater attached by a long arm to the top of their cars. They had to grate as much cheese as possible by driving around it.
Pure, delicious absurdity? You may think so, but to the drift car driving community it made perfect sense.
The next act pitted a contortionist who shoots arrows with her feet (and was blindfolded for this trial) against a group of acrobat/dancers with spring loaded stilts and fireworks. In that kind of competition, the it's the audience that wins.
The final segment was a competition between two unicyclists. These guys are apparently well known in the unicycling community. (People who think skateboarding or stunt biking is too easy, I guess.)
There's a photo gallery on the official site, if you want the flavor.
The winner was the contortionist, Princess Elayne. This was as it should be.
Okay, I understand that this kind of thing isn't exactly intellectually demanding. But there's no reason why it should be. Are parades intellectually demanding? Are fireworks? Does anyone dislike fireworks? (Other than America-hating communist terrorists, of course?) No!
This is what you call "innocent fun." And we need it. Watching this stuff makes us all kids again. Complete with sense of wonder and childlike glee. Helps us resist the temptation to take ourselves too seriously. Helps us relax and enjoy. What I'm saying is, the world is a better, happier place, and we are better, happier people because of this kind of show.
So all of you, if you can't run off and join the circus, at least do your part to keep this show on the air. You know you want to. It's your civic duty.
Thursday, June 29 at 8/7c on ABC. This week features a low-rider car jumping rope.
Surely the same things people have always loved to watch: Acrobats! Jugglers! Dancers and daredevils! Spectacle!
For some reason, American television hasn't really gone this route. Circuses remain popular in this country as they have been throughout history... (Ken and I saw the Greatest Show on Earth last year, featuring the amazing Sylvia Zerbini and Crazy Wilson. I've had those pages bookmarked for a long time now, waiting for a blog post I could work them into.) Do television producers here think this stuff won't sell on TV? But it does in other countries! For that matter, it does fine in this country on the Spanish language channels. And what do you think professional wrestling is, really, besides wildly successful? And then there are stunt-based reality shows like Fear Factor. And, prosaic by comparison, all of the different talent shows, from Star Search to whatever this new Simon Cowell thing is to "Ice Skating with Celebrities" or whatever it's called.
But the country best known for pushing the limits of the ridiculous is Japan, and it is from Japan that the concept for the purest spectacle on American television comes:
Master of Champions. You've got to love it for the name alone.
The format is, weirdly enough, almost exactly like "Iron Chef." Three judges (including Oksana Baiul!) and inappropriate sports-caster commentary from confused hosts (one of whom is apparently married to the White Sox's Scott Podsednik.) Only there are more competitors, and the judges don't really get to choose the winners. They -- look, don't try to understand it. How the winner is chosen really doesn't matter. They're all champions.
The series premiere started with people doing donuts in their cars around a block of cheese. There was a cheese grater attached by a long arm to the top of their cars. They had to grate as much cheese as possible by driving around it.
Pure, delicious absurdity? You may think so, but to the drift car driving community it made perfect sense.
The next act pitted a contortionist who shoots arrows with her feet (and was blindfolded for this trial) against a group of acrobat/dancers with spring loaded stilts and fireworks. In that kind of competition, the it's the audience that wins.
The final segment was a competition between two unicyclists. These guys are apparently well known in the unicycling community. (People who think skateboarding or stunt biking is too easy, I guess.)
There's a photo gallery on the official site, if you want the flavor.
The winner was the contortionist, Princess Elayne. This was as it should be.
Okay, I understand that this kind of thing isn't exactly intellectually demanding. But there's no reason why it should be. Are parades intellectually demanding? Are fireworks? Does anyone dislike fireworks? (Other than America-hating communist terrorists, of course?) No!
This is what you call "innocent fun." And we need it. Watching this stuff makes us all kids again. Complete with sense of wonder and childlike glee. Helps us resist the temptation to take ourselves too seriously. Helps us relax and enjoy. What I'm saying is, the world is a better, happier place, and we are better, happier people because of this kind of show.
So all of you, if you can't run off and join the circus, at least do your part to keep this show on the air. You know you want to. It's your civic duty.
Thursday, June 29 at 8/7c on ABC. This week features a low-rider car jumping rope.
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Candidate Ken
No, he's not running for anything. Ken gave his thesis proposal today, and it was accepted by his commitee, which raises him to the status of "PhD Candidate" (at least, as soon as the paperwork is done.)
And I've got to say -- as a colleague -- he kicked butt. Hardly any "ums" and "uhs" even when unexpected questions forced him to try to explain complicated concepts not covered in his prepared talk. Didn't have to rush, never got boring or bogged down, covered all the material, transitioned smoothly, kept the audience engaged, and clearly knew more than anybody in the room about the project, and knew he knew it. Made a couple of jokes, and got into a couple of interesting side discussions. In short: professional.
But what does this "candidacy" mean? Well, Wikipedia says that at some universities it's an actual degree:
What it means at our university is 1: He can't take classes anymore for credit. He's done being a student, officially. His job now is research. And 2: his tuition (which is paid for mostly out of our advisor's grant money) is now therefor much cheaper. This makes our advisor happy. And of course 3: the last formal requirement left for him for graduation is actually defending his thesis.
My turn will come after I've completed all my required classes, which I'm not planning to do until next winter (which is when the classes I want to take are next offered.) I hope I do as well.
And I've got to say -- as a colleague -- he kicked butt. Hardly any "ums" and "uhs" even when unexpected questions forced him to try to explain complicated concepts not covered in his prepared talk. Didn't have to rush, never got boring or bogged down, covered all the material, transitioned smoothly, kept the audience engaged, and clearly knew more than anybody in the room about the project, and knew he knew it. Made a couple of jokes, and got into a couple of interesting side discussions. In short: professional.
But what does this "candidacy" mean? Well, Wikipedia says that at some universities it's an actual degree:
All But Dissertation or All But Degree, abbreviated ABD, or Candidatus Philosophiae or Candidate in Philosophy, abbreviated C.Phil. is a formal academic degree awarded to a student, or an informal status that says a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) student has completed all graduate study leading up to the final dissertation. This typically includes graduate coursework, preliminary/cumulative/qualifying examinations, and defense of the dissertation prospectus, advanced to candidacy.
Sometimes "C.Phil." or "Ph.D. (ABD)" is used as a title. In the U.S., ABD is an unofficial status, and C.Phil. is an official degree at very few universities.
In some schools a student can write an additional thesis at this point and receive a Master of Philosophy (MPhil) degree; in others, the MA, MS or MPhil (sometimes Candidate in Philosophy, CPhil) is conferred on an ABD student who has been advanced to candidacy for the Ph.D. Additionally, some American universities award the Master of Philosophy to students who have completed the coursework necessary for a Ph.D. but who have not completed the dissertation.
What it means at our university is 1: He can't take classes anymore for credit. He's done being a student, officially. His job now is research. And 2: his tuition (which is paid for mostly out of our advisor's grant money) is now therefor much cheaper. This makes our advisor happy. And of course 3: the last formal requirement left for him for graduation is actually defending his thesis.
My turn will come after I've completed all my required classes, which I'm not planning to do until next winter (which is when the classes I want to take are next offered.) I hope I do as well.
Monday, June 19, 2006
Linkiness
Marginally science related fun:
How to levitate a frog. Via Ken. Make sure to click the "direct link to video" under the picture.
How did "Duck Hunt" know where you were shooting?. Search inspired by a conversation with my brother, who couldn't believe Ken and I fell for the Back to the Future hoverboard scam, but had to admit there were technological wonders of the '80s he couldn't explain either.
Speaking of which, I also seem to remember a TV segment from the '80s about flying cars that we could expect on the market any day. Turns out, this company has been making them (prototypes of them at least) since the sixties. Link via UserFriendly's Link of the Day
Beautiful High Res Hubble Images via Jaquandor. One of these is now our desktop wallpaper.
Optical Properties and Optical Phenomena in Gemstones Strange to see dispersion and diffraction and total internal reflection and atomic crystal lattices mentioned in the context of jewels. As far as I can tell the physics here is all correct, but approached very differently than what I'm used to. Birefringence is described without ever mentioning polarization, for instance... Via Making Light. (I take it back, they do mention polarization further down, with a lot of neat pictures of gems taken through crossed polarizers.)
That's all I've got for now.
How to levitate a frog. Via Ken. Make sure to click the "direct link to video" under the picture.
How did "Duck Hunt" know where you were shooting?. Search inspired by a conversation with my brother, who couldn't believe Ken and I fell for the Back to the Future hoverboard scam, but had to admit there were technological wonders of the '80s he couldn't explain either.
Speaking of which, I also seem to remember a TV segment from the '80s about flying cars that we could expect on the market any day. Turns out, this company has been making them (prototypes of them at least) since the sixties. Link via UserFriendly's Link of the Day
Beautiful High Res Hubble Images via Jaquandor. One of these is now our desktop wallpaper.
Optical Properties and Optical Phenomena in Gemstones Strange to see dispersion and diffraction and total internal reflection and atomic crystal lattices mentioned in the context of jewels. As far as I can tell the physics here is all correct, but approached very differently than what I'm used to. Birefringence is described without ever mentioning polarization, for instance... Via Making Light. (I take it back, they do mention polarization further down, with a lot of neat pictures of gems taken through crossed polarizers.)
That's all I've got for now.
Sunday, June 11, 2006
If I Were a Republican
I've noticed that when I mention politics on this blog, it's usually to explain the thinking of conservatives to my liberal friends. But I think I make myself sound more conservative than I really am. For the record: I'm anti-war and pro-environment. I don't believe the free market can solve every problem. I believe public education and a welfare safety net benefit everyone, and I'm willing to pay higher taxes to fund them. I think corporations have too much power today. I support unions as the most direct counter-balance for that power. And I don't feel my marriage is threatened by gay marriage, even though I understand why some people do.
I'm a Democrat. And I'm really glad I am. Because if I were a Republican, I'd be feeling pretty betrayed, right now. Especially if I were a fiscal responsibility *, personal * liberty * kind of Republican.
Those links go to the federal debt, Patriot Act, and wiretap stories everyone already knows about. Everyone also knows about Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo Bay. But I've realized that if I were a Republican, there'd be a lot of stories I wouldn't really know about. Because these stories haven't made it into the national media much at all, much less to Fox News. So for the benefit of my Republican readers (I hope I haven't alienated them), here's a couple of stories that are old news on the blogosphere:
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose death was recently announced as a victory by American forces, could have been killed or captured a long time ago. He was deliberately allowed to operate in the American patrolled no-fly zone. There is speculation that he was not interfered with because his base provided justification for connecting the invasion of Iraq to the "War on Terror."
The Pentagon is trying to remove Geneva Convention policies from the Army Field manual.
Bush has excused publicly traded defense contractors from normal accounting and securities-disclosure obligations.
President "Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution." That's a quote from the lead paragraph of the Boston Globe article.
And then there's the human trafficking stories. Some measures have been taken to put a stop to this, but they were delayed, and appear to have been driven by a general using his own authority to give orders, not as a matter of policy change by the administration or pentagon.
I understand why people voted for Bush, understand that most of the people who did so are intelligent and sincere and decent. But Bush and co. aren't what they pretended to be. I'm glad I'm not a Republican right now, because I would be pissed off at being so deceived.
As a Republican, I wouldn't like finding myself identified with the-- they're the villains of these stories.
Actually, as an American, I don't like it. These are the bad guys. But they say they're on my side. That makes me a bad guy too, at least in the eyes of the rest of the world. I don't like finding myself in that position.
So, I can sympathize with the Republicans...
I'm a Democrat. And I'm really glad I am. Because if I were a Republican, I'd be feeling pretty betrayed, right now. Especially if I were a fiscal responsibility *, personal * liberty * kind of Republican.
Those links go to the federal debt, Patriot Act, and wiretap stories everyone already knows about. Everyone also knows about Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo Bay. But I've realized that if I were a Republican, there'd be a lot of stories I wouldn't really know about. Because these stories haven't made it into the national media much at all, much less to Fox News. So for the benefit of my Republican readers (I hope I haven't alienated them), here's a couple of stories that are old news on the blogosphere:
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose death was recently announced as a victory by American forces, could have been killed or captured a long time ago. He was deliberately allowed to operate in the American patrolled no-fly zone. There is speculation that he was not interfered with because his base provided justification for connecting the invasion of Iraq to the "War on Terror."
The Pentagon is trying to remove Geneva Convention policies from the Army Field manual.
Bush has excused publicly traded defense contractors from normal accounting and securities-disclosure obligations.
President "Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution." That's a quote from the lead paragraph of the Boston Globe article.
And then there's the human trafficking stories. Some measures have been taken to put a stop to this, but they were delayed, and appear to have been driven by a general using his own authority to give orders, not as a matter of policy change by the administration or pentagon.
I understand why people voted for Bush, understand that most of the people who did so are intelligent and sincere and decent. But Bush and co. aren't what they pretended to be. I'm glad I'm not a Republican right now, because I would be pissed off at being so deceived.
As a Republican, I wouldn't like finding myself identified with the-- they're the villains of these stories.
Actually, as an American, I don't like it. These are the bad guys. But they say they're on my side. That makes me a bad guy too, at least in the eyes of the rest of the world. I don't like finding myself in that position.
So, I can sympathize with the Republicans...
Sunday, June 04, 2006
May and June Poems
For May -- this one I really couldn't resist:
The Bathtub
by: Ezra Pound
As a bathtub lined with white porcelain,
When the hot water gives out or goes tepid,
So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion,
O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.
.
.
.
For June -- this one relates to the post below:
The Logical Conclusion
by: Ezra Pound
When earth's last thesis is copied
From the theses that went before,
When idea from fact has departed
And bare-boned factlets shall bore,
When all joy shall have fled from study
And scholarship reign supreme;
When truth shall "baaa" on the hill crests
And no one shall dare to dream;
When all the good poems have been buried
With comment annoted in full
And art shall bow down in homage
To scholarship's zinc-plated bull,
When there shall be nothing to research
But the notes of annoted notes,
And Baalam's ass shall inquire
The price of imported oats;
Then no one shall tell him the answer
For each shall know the one fact
That lies in the special ass-ignment
From which he is making his tract.
So the ass shall sigh uninstructed
While each in his separate book
Shall grind for the love of grinding
And only the devil shall look.
Against the "germanic" system of graduate study and insane specialization in the Inanities.
The Bathtub
by: Ezra Pound
As a bathtub lined with white porcelain,
When the hot water gives out or goes tepid,
So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion,
O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.
.
.
.
For June -- this one relates to the post below:
The Logical Conclusion
by: Ezra Pound
When earth's last thesis is copied
From the theses that went before,
When idea from fact has departed
And bare-boned factlets shall bore,
When all joy shall have fled from study
And scholarship reign supreme;
When truth shall "baaa" on the hill crests
And no one shall dare to dream;
When all the good poems have been buried
With comment annoted in full
And art shall bow down in homage
To scholarship's zinc-plated bull,
When there shall be nothing to research
But the notes of annoted notes,
And Baalam's ass shall inquire
The price of imported oats;
Then no one shall tell him the answer
For each shall know the one fact
That lies in the special ass-ignment
From which he is making his tract.
So the ass shall sigh uninstructed
While each in his separate book
Shall grind for the love of grinding
And only the devil shall look.
Against the "germanic" system of graduate study and insane specialization in the Inanities.
"Optics man is busy preparing to wrap the coils."
Searching the internet to see if I could find out what the boiling point of Rubidium at pressures of ~10^(-6) Torr is (anyone know? Or know where to look it up?), I came across a site made by some students who seem to be trying to build a rubidium atom trap, but on a much smaller scale than our setup -- I guess they don't have to fit a cavity in their trap. Compare their pictures with ours -- there's no way we're building an oven around our system. We just wrap the heater coils around it and cover the whole thing with tinfoil, when we need to bake.
I am of course fascinated by this. It's weird to see someone else suffer through the same things, and weird to see their different approach to some of the problems.
They don't say whether they ever succeeded or not. The story ends with the coils still nonexistant. But I love "optics man." I'm totally going to build his brother, for our lab.
Also on the topic of seeing other people suffer in familiar ways: "Colst" explains the ways in which graduate student life is completely and utterly different than undergraduate life, which most people, including undergraduates who are considering grad school, completely fail to grasp.
I am of course fascinated by this. It's weird to see someone else suffer through the same things, and weird to see their different approach to some of the problems.
They don't say whether they ever succeeded or not. The story ends with the coils still nonexistant. But I love "optics man." I'm totally going to build his brother, for our lab.
Also on the topic of seeing other people suffer in familiar ways: "Colst" explains the ways in which graduate student life is completely and utterly different than undergraduate life, which most people, including undergraduates who are considering grad school, completely fail to grasp.
Thursday, May 25, 2006
Trap Day!
Wait, didn't I already have a post called "Trap Day"?
Well, yes, and we saw the trap pretty much every day after that for a while, but this is an even better trap day than that.
That trap used a set of magnetic coils which had been handed down to us from grad student generation to grad student generation. Unfortunately, those coils were too large for our purposes. To make any progress, we were going to have to replace them. Last September, we did that... And the trap stopped working, for reasons we never exactly figured out. I thought it was never going to work again, until that day in January, when it finally did... With the old, too large coils.
Last week, right before we left for Hawaii, we opened the vacuum system and put in a different set of smaller coils. (Then we sealed it up and gave it the week it needs to bake out and pump down.) I was morally sure they would never work, and ready to quit if they didn't. It would have meant eight months worth of work down the drain, and no way forward.
But we got a trap! We got a trap! We got a trap! And on the first try. That never happens. Ken, at least, has been through this process many times, with a couple of different post-docs, and it just isn't supposed to work that fast. And this despite the fact that the chirp laser was seriously messed up this morning (Ken is now killer at fixing diode lasers) and the argon laser is dying (Pati made it work, eventually) and the Ti:Sapph laser control box kept messing with the lock (Ken and Pati together) and we ran out of liquid nitrogen (it takes an hour to fill) and the vacuum is still fluctuating and the trap cameras all got moved, and the new coils blocked their angles of view... In spite of almost everything going wrong that could go wrong, we got got a trap on our first try.
And now we have coils that will work, in there, and a mock-up of our cavity, and our impossible project is still on, and Ken can say in his thesis proposal (coming soon) that a major hurdle has already been overcome.
But I don't want to press our luck. Maybe we should quit while we're ahead, take a break to savor the success... Maybe we need to go back to Hawaii, now.
Well, yes, and we saw the trap pretty much every day after that for a while, but this is an even better trap day than that.
That trap used a set of magnetic coils which had been handed down to us from grad student generation to grad student generation. Unfortunately, those coils were too large for our purposes. To make any progress, we were going to have to replace them. Last September, we did that... And the trap stopped working, for reasons we never exactly figured out. I thought it was never going to work again, until that day in January, when it finally did... With the old, too large coils.
Last week, right before we left for Hawaii, we opened the vacuum system and put in a different set of smaller coils. (Then we sealed it up and gave it the week it needs to bake out and pump down.) I was morally sure they would never work, and ready to quit if they didn't. It would have meant eight months worth of work down the drain, and no way forward.
But we got a trap! We got a trap! We got a trap! And on the first try. That never happens. Ken, at least, has been through this process many times, with a couple of different post-docs, and it just isn't supposed to work that fast. And this despite the fact that the chirp laser was seriously messed up this morning (Ken is now killer at fixing diode lasers) and the argon laser is dying (Pati made it work, eventually) and the Ti:Sapph laser control box kept messing with the lock (Ken and Pati together) and we ran out of liquid nitrogen (it takes an hour to fill) and the vacuum is still fluctuating and the trap cameras all got moved, and the new coils blocked their angles of view... In spite of almost everything going wrong that could go wrong, we got got a trap on our first try.
And now we have coils that will work, in there, and a mock-up of our cavity, and our impossible project is still on, and Ken can say in his thesis proposal (coming soon) that a major hurdle has already been overcome.
But I don't want to press our luck. Maybe we should quit while we're ahead, take a break to savor the success... Maybe we need to go back to Hawaii, now.
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Hawaii: A Pretty Nice Place
So, my dad has been saving up frequent flier miles for years to take my mom to Hawaii. But my mom wanted to take the whole family. (Thank you, Mom!) The complicated nature of a project like that, and the sheer number of frequent flier miles required, and the way that busy people have of putting off vacations, meant it felt like it was never going to happen.
Until some friends -- they were our next door neighbors twenty years ago in San Antonio, and moved to Colorado shortly after we did, for the first time -- invited us along on their Hawaii trip, to see their daughter's graduation. (These same friends had come along on my parents' trip to see my graduation, in the Seattle area. So there was a kind of symmetry.)
What this meant for Ken and me was that we got a call out of the blue one day: "If we went to Hawaii in May, would you be interested in coming?"
There is only one possible answer to that question. (Well, there are two, but "Duh!" isn't very polite...) That's the kind of prize you usually only win on a game show. On Fear Factor, you'd have to eat a couple of pounds of live insects just for a chance at a prize like that.
Since we had nothing to do in regards to planning this trip, it sort of got pushed out of our minds, as work got more and more stressful and Ken's candidacy came over the horizon. But all of the sudden it was time to go. Frequent flier miles had been spent on tickets in our name. A beach house was reserved with room for six (if two slept on a futon in the living room.) All we had to do was pack our bags the night before, and catch a cab to the aiport. (We caught the cab at 3:00AM, from the lab, where we had stopped to check on the baking vacuum system).
It was a surreal experience (especially with the ten hour flight and the five hour time zone change.) But when we got to the beach house, it was literally on the beach. You could watch surfers from the deck.
And we did. For a week, we watched surfers (including my brother and sister, and also the friends who invited us) and grilled out, and played in the waves. Gorgeous white sand.
And then we did all the activities the guide book told us too, too many to describe. But the highlights were a swim with dolphins who really did seem uncannily human, and, the final night, a luau and show at the Polynesian Cultural Center, complete with Fire Knife Dancers.
I filled up my camera's flash card for the first time ever. And half a dozen rolls of film. So even though it went fast, I'm definitely going to remember it.
Saturday, May 06, 2006
Serendipity
So, two Fridays ago, we were in the lab doing the kind of horrible stuff I described in the "Happy Monday" post. I was trying to shine light onto one end of an especially skinny fiber optic fiber and get it to come out the other end, and not having much success, when I noticed a funny smell. Usually in our lab, when you smell something funny, it means something is burning, probably the insulation on some high current wires... I asked Ken and our post doc if they smelled it. Our post-doc said "that's gas." And we were all confused, because what in our lab uses gas?
Still, we assumed the problem was coming from our lab, and went to tell our advisor. He could smell it in his office, too. And the hallway. Could it be coming from our other lab? Should we see if it smelled so strong in other hallways? He called facilities management to report it. They had no advice for us. As we stood around trying to decide what to investigate, we all began to feel a bit woozy, and went outside.
Other people were pouring out. From all of the hallways. We decided it probably wasn't us. There was some construction on the north side of the building, maybe they hit a pipe. Beautiful, sunny day. We stood around talking with a friend for a while, and then decided to go for lunch. The Fire Department had been called. We could see emergency lighting. We figured the building would be closed for a while.
But when we got to the student union building, on the other side of campus, the power was out. So then we started worrying -- if there's a power outage and our pumps go off, and then later the power goes on but the pressure is high, that can kill the pumps. About $10,000, right there. And if the power wasn't out... Should we tell people the lasers were on? We hadn't wanted to turn them off in case that caused sparks..
So, anyway, we went to our post-doc's place, spent some time on the phone with some very confused people who contradicted each other but finally said the power was on in our building (which seemed very strange, as that's where the gas leak was) and that our equipment was fine, decided we'd done all we could. We enjoyed a delicious lunch, and then a walk by the lake. We eventually went back to check on everything, after the all-clear, but it was basically a really nice day off, outside, out of our darkened lab with its tedious little knobs... We decided there should be a gas leak every Friday.
But what we didn't know, was that the fates were conspiring to give us our nice day off...
I have only two further comments to make on these amazing revelations: First, Eugene S. Sunshine? And second, a "subject" in the lab? Because grad students are subjects of his royal highness, their advisor, I guess...
But for a single day, all us subjects threw off the chains of our oppressors, and enjoyed the sunshine.
Still, we assumed the problem was coming from our lab, and went to tell our advisor. He could smell it in his office, too. And the hallway. Could it be coming from our other lab? Should we see if it smelled so strong in other hallways? He called facilities management to report it. They had no advice for us. As we stood around trying to decide what to investigate, we all began to feel a bit woozy, and went outside.
Other people were pouring out. From all of the hallways. We decided it probably wasn't us. There was some construction on the north side of the building, maybe they hit a pipe. Beautiful, sunny day. We stood around talking with a friend for a while, and then decided to go for lunch. The Fire Department had been called. We could see emergency lighting. We figured the building would be closed for a while.
But when we got to the student union building, on the other side of campus, the power was out. So then we started worrying -- if there's a power outage and our pumps go off, and then later the power goes on but the pressure is high, that can kill the pumps. About $10,000, right there. And if the power wasn't out... Should we tell people the lasers were on? We hadn't wanted to turn them off in case that caused sparks..
So, anyway, we went to our post-doc's place, spent some time on the phone with some very confused people who contradicted each other but finally said the power was on in our building (which seemed very strange, as that's where the gas leak was) and that our equipment was fine, decided we'd done all we could. We enjoyed a delicious lunch, and then a walk by the lake. We eventually went back to check on everything, after the all-clear, but it was basically a really nice day off, outside, out of our darkened lab with its tedious little knobs... We decided there should be a gas leak every Friday.
But what we didn't know, was that the fates were conspiring to give us our nice day off...
From: Eugene S. Sunshine, Vice President for Business and Finance, and C. Bradley Moore, Vice President for Research
On Friday April 21, 2006 at approximately 11:02 AM University Police (UP) began to receive numerous phone calls of a strong odor of natural gas in campus buildings. The Fire Department was immediately notified and responded along with UP officers and Facilities Management personnel.
As building evacuations were proceeding, a member of the Office for Research Safety responded to the incident command post and reported a small spill of the reagent Thiol in the Center for Nanofabrication and Molecular Self-Assembly. This chemical is not harmful but emits a strong odor similar to the smell of natural gas. This chemical spill was later identified as the cause of the natural gas smell in multiple buildings.
At approximately 11:30 AM a power outage occurred affecting a portion of the campus. The outage was caused by tree removal work that damaged a power transformer. The outage affected approximately 16 campus buildings including some of those reporting the smell of natural gas.
At 12:34 PM, after the affected buildings were reopened, a fire was reported in a laboratory hood in the Center for Catalysis and Surface Science. The Fire Department responded and learned that a subject in the lab had utilized a fire extinguisher to extinguish the fire. The subject then left the room and activated the fire alarm system in the building. The Fire Department inspected the affected hood and determined that damage was confined to the inside of the hood. The fire alarm was reset and the building was declared safe.
No injuries were reported in these incidents. No significant damage to facilities occurred. A post-event action report to analyze the response of participating agencies and departments is being developed to identify strengths and areas for improvement.
I have only two further comments to make on these amazing revelations: First, Eugene S. Sunshine? And second, a "subject" in the lab? Because grad students are subjects of his royal highness, their advisor, I guess...
But for a single day, all us subjects threw off the chains of our oppressors, and enjoyed the sunshine.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)