Swans on Tea

The other morning I made sure to tell a colleague about Whiteboard Tower Defense, a potentially addictive flash game. The colleague is giving a talk next week and in the finest tradition of physics research, had barely started to assemble his powerpoint slides and was starting to stress a little. So a time-wasting [...]

One of the questions one asks when trapping atoms in a magneto-optic trap (MOT) is “What shall we do with the atoms?” You often have an idea before you do the trapping — it’s not like we’re trophy hunters, trapping just to have something on the wall. Trapping in and of itself hasn’t [...]

I was wiring up some stuff in the lab, and wondered what color-coding we had used for that component on the prototype.
“It’s red” was the almost immediate reply.

Duh. I had expunged this from the buffer. They’re almost all red. That’s why we went with color coding — so much easier than labels.

On Thursday the department was treated to a pizza lunch by one of the senior staff (or his slush fund) in recognition of some recent events. Not too long ago, the remnants of hurricane Hannah swept through the area, and that meant a lot of work preparing equipment that’s exposed to the elements for [...]

Because of the timekeeping implications of what we do in the lab and especially so because of the gee-whiz nature of table-top-ish atomic physics, I’m sometimes called upon to give (or assist with) lab tours to various visitors. Sometimes it’s scientists whom we’ve invited, and those are usually the best because you get to [...]

There’s always a right tool for the job, or so some people say. It has been observed that vice grips are never the right tool for the job, but they are indispensable because they are the wrong tool for so many jobs.
(tightening a screw in a tight space with a phillips bit held by [...]

The other thing that struck me about bait-and-switch was this
I gravitated toward a scientific life with fantasies of sci-fi movies running through my head, with large machines emitting lightning at the flip of a huge Frankenstein-type switch, or several people poring over softly-glowing computer screens as an experiment produces fantastic data in real-time, and [...]

FemaleScienceProfessor discusses the pros and cons of talk vs. poster, confounded by the politics of being involved in the conference. Physics conferences in particular have a certain breakdown that’s mentioned over at Uncertain Principles, that being invited talks, contributed talks and posters. It was my impression that posters weren’t nearly as big a [...]

I’m shocked, shocked, to find that I’m getting shocked. My adventures with static electricity.
It’s winter, it’s dry and that makes for pretty good sparks. I haven’t been going to the gym the last few mornings (recovering from being unwell) but have been going to work, so that means peeling off some layers of [...]

Over at Uncertain principles, Chad talks about how Nobody Expects Bose-Einstein Condensation, i.e. while the phenomenon had been predicted, the enabling technology was serendipitous.
What really made [magneto-optic trapping] take off, though, was that people figured out you could get the laser cooling wavelength for rubidium from diode lasers. And diode lasers are manufactured in mass [...]

When you can’t grab more real estate, you make more room in the lab. Four physicists move two optical tables, and nobody gets injured. Who’d have thunk it?
Officially, not really. This is all a gag, a spoof, a put-upon, since somebody, somewhere might frown upon the kind of do-it-yourself attitude of [...]