First Shots, Last Shots

First Shots was this weekend in Charleston, SC. Voodoo (SE) went 3-3, with two of the losses being to UNCW and the other by a point.  It was a nice start, and I am looking forward to seeing what the team can do with a full roster.

Last shot to Grammy, who passed away over the weekend.  My father's parents lived right across from the turkey farm, and as kids we would take a Grammy Break about twice a week where we (my Father, Uncle Art and whatever kids where around) would go to my grandparent's house and eat cookies / ice cream.  We always seemed to do this after moving turkeys, and would go down to her house in the turkey loader. So drink your whiskey neat this weekend.

Measurement Repeatibility

I think that once I am done graduate school I am going to get away from doing measurements.  My group takes the measurements I make as a physical constant when I can get them to change daily (if you ever want to mess up a scintillation experiment put a tin can around the PMT). In any case even when the repeatability looks good (see the following two plots), at very low count rates (past channel 4,000) the variation becomes quite large, and this is the feature of interest.

The solution?  Only measure once.

Other thoughts:

• In addition to posting you speed on the electronic speed gun signs, they should post the fine you would get.
• First Voodoo (SE) club tournament is First Shots, in Charleston, SC.  To the BEACH!  I hate sand.

Poultry Days (Results)

Voodoo Chicken Blood

Poultry Days!  I think it is one of the tournaments you have to go to in order to know how much fun it is. A lot of shenanigans went down, and we even managed to win a few games (Knoxville hadn't won games in a few years).  I am amazed at how good most of the teams were; for a pickup tournament it was quite competitive. We ended up going 2-3, with 2 of the 3 losses being on universe point.

Notable events:

• Eating at the original Kentucky Fried Chicken on the way to Ohio (this involved us getting a little bit lost in Kentucky)
• Trying (but failing) to win the fields Friday
• Winning the fields Saturday
• Eating lots of delicous chicken
• Playing D on my own team the first round on Saturday.  I really thought we were on defense . . .
• Making lots of chicken / poultry puns

Poultry Days

Poultry Days!  This should be a lot of fun, and a good break.

Transit of Venus

Once in a lifetime, folks!

Fishing while watching the transit.  NatGeo's photo.

Honestly, it just seemed to be a spot on the sun.  It was more interesting to watch the sun spots.

Fabricated Layered Detector

The idea is to layer thin films detectors onto an optically clear substrate material*.  It is our first step toward a fabricated detector, and it looks good.

Fabricated Detector.  Thin films are sandwiched between glass slides

Fabricated detector was wrapped in teflon tape to reflect light.

Teflon tape was wrapped in light absorbent black tape to minimize light leaks

Hopefully by the end of this week we can take one of the Cf-252 sources and actually mock up the DHS criteria to get an idea of detector performance.

*We made a serious design flaw in using off-the self microscope slides.  We don't know how much boron is in them (most glasses is 5%), and boron-10 (a large neutron absorber) is 20% of natural boron. A better choice would be quartz, or a clear polymer that would further moderate the incident neutron spectra.

Boiling Water

Today I made my first thermocouple!  I took some thermocouple wire and used a tiny little welder to zap them together, it took a couple of tries though, as I had the welder on it's "Turbo" setting and would just burn the wire.

DAQ and thermocouple. Currently only reading jibberish from thermocouple.

I plan on going to GoodWill tomorrow and getting a cheap pot.  I'm going to punch a hole through the lid, insert my thermocouple (maybe make it float on a cork), and look how the temperature profile of the heater water as a function of the amount of water in the pot.  I expect it to be fairly linear in the begining (following q=mcT), but after vapor pressure is built up I expect it to become slightly non-linear.

To the beach for some go-go juice!