End of Summer

Whoosh, and summer is gone. It was a busy end of August for me.  I successfully defended my thesis proposal, which basically served as an introduction to the project for the committee members, as well as an opportunity for them to suggest side projects that I should work on for them.  Most of the criticism had to do with how I explained my genetic algorithm setup, which I think stems mostly from doing a poor job explaining it - I had those slides in as backup the day before but removed them because I figured it wasn't that hard.

I then went home for 10 days, and had a lovely time visiting the family - picking peaches, potatoes, and apples (Sansa, Ginger Gold, and some Summer Rambo).  I highly recommend Sansa as an early season eating apple - it is a Gala cross that comes in about 1 week before Gala.  David has done some really excellent work in the Bum House - I think the next time I go home I need to claim out my room.  I think instead of this seasoned (old) pine barn board floors in David I want to put down flagstone, and heat / cool with a solar water based system.

I am also working on the simulation of a gamma collimator, which is going very well and is pretty cool.  I don't have the angular resolution that I would want, but I think that I could get there.  The simulations (results shown below) are actually some of my more clever ones - using all sorts of biasing techniques, and for the most part they match the measured in shape.

Image of a collimator used for measurement.  The source is placed on the aluminum rail.

This and the next weekend are taken up by frisbee (Shawn Adams and sectionals), which I am excited for because both are close and Voodoo is looking pretty sharp.

ARI Conference and Summer League Finals

The ARI conference was Tuesday - Thursday of the past week.  I think it was one of the better ARI conferences that I have attended - but it was definitely made better by meeting David and then heading into DC.  Little brat didn't like my poster - thought that it was a little too loud.I am always amazed at the SHEILD program at Texas AM, the presenter is always good and they seem to do interesting work on where to put detectors.

At lot of the new work in detector simulations seems to be starting to go onto the light transport aspects, which I think is pretty cool; at least we are not last!  I was also surprised in talking to the presenters how few of them actually used a VCS - I would hate to read their spagetti code.

In addition, it was mentioned twice that nuclear material has never been interdicted in the United States. I am not sure of all of the details, but if true that seems very remarkable - either the threat isn't there, we have been successful at interdictions outside of the US, or somebody is biding there time in the US.

Navy Ninja's fell again to Ron Burgundy in the summer league semis. Still a little upset about that game - I had two turns (if I was on the sideline receiver error would have been called) that put us down three breaks to start.  We got within two, but we didn't have the energy to capitalize on our break opportunities.  Looking back I recognize the value of the quick strike after a turn not as an easy score opportunity, but as a way to conserve energy by avoiding the entire team actually having to work for the point.  I think a lot of the loss was fatigue, our women were savage and our top men were playing a 4 on 1 off rotation (Gilley was absent, probably in Hawaii).  Anyway, there are a few hilarious pictures on Facebook of the game.