Swans on Tea

Laser Smackdown: The Most Amazing Use of a Laser?
Chad asks the question in general, but I am going to personalize it. I’ve had the opportunity to do some neat things with lasers, mostly related to laser cooling and trapping. I’ve trapped K-37, K-38(m), K-40, K-41, Rb-85, Rb-87, and Cs-133 (the first two of [...]

There are some bits of dialog that just kill a conversation.
On Thursday I accumulated the datum that the phrase I might work better wearing lederhosen, but we’re just not going to find that out instantly ends the meeting.
(No, I wasn’t the one who spoke the line)

Since the Last Progress Report, I Have Worked on This Progress Report
This always takes much longer than it ought to, in large part because it’s hard to remember exactly when certain significant things happened, which leads to a lot of searching of my email trying to determine when various things saw print, and which of [...]

Paul Graham: What Startups are Really Like
The cofounder is your thesis advisor. There are many points with a pretty decent correlation to life in grad school, at least for physics, and my datum.
I’ve been surprised again and again by just how much more important persistence is than raw intelligence.
Not that physics grad school [...]

I was sorting through some email (searching for some old tidbit) and ran across a few chuckle-inducing transmissions I had saved. Someone who used to sort the mail ages ago was a few quarks short of the standard model, and these are some email inquiries we got as the person attempted to track down [...]

Over at incoherently scattered ponderings, there’s a post on safety at academic labs, which links to an article at Slate about an explosion at a lab which killed a worker, and discusses the difference in safety standards for students vs workers, and academia vs industry.
Why the difference between industry and academe? For one thing, the [...]

I was decreasing the local entropy in a small part of my abode and found a shoebox full of photos which happened to contain a few shots of my grad school lab, in all its glory. We were building an interferometer which would use cold atoms, which means relatively large deBroglie wavelengths and a [...]

It’s getting to be inventory time again, and that usually invokes trepidation and stirs the nightmares of the ghost of bureaucracy past. Somebody, somewhere, needs to know that all that shiny equipment you’ve purchased hasn’t walked off, and that’s fair enough — I’m spending somebody else’s money, and they have the right to know [...]

Eating al desco
I was recently eating lunch ‘al desco’. While I was eating-working, a student walked in my office to ask me a question, saw I was eating lunch at my desk, and said “Oh, I’m so sorry for interrupting your lunch. I’ll come back later.”
I was stunned. This has never happened to me before.
I’ve [...]

We’re rearranging the lab, and clearing out some old equipment, including taking down part of the original Cesium Fountain laser layout (which uses a lot of optical table space). A colleague was moving a rack, and wanted to know where it should go. I suggested next to a hard place, but leaving a [...]

Scott Adams (fellow Hartwick alum) continually tells people, “No, I don’t work at your company,” because the problems he lampoons are so widespread.
Allyson points out a problem that is less so, that of purchasing within government regulations, in the shoe bomber theory of purchasing regulations. So in this case she does [...]

Every so often the powers that be™ decide that a reorganization would be a good idea, and that some people should change offices. A few years back this was stimulated by one group of people vacating some desirable office space in the main building (they were ordered to relocate to Crystal City by [...]