Monthly Archives: September 2008

This morning, as a sociological adventure and at a friend’s suggestion, I attended the Harvard Conservative Minyan’s Rosh Hashanah morning service. It was certainly very different. The Reform services I’m used to are done largely in English, dominated by responsive … Continue reading →

It’s Rosh Hashanah (ראש השנה , for all you Unicode fans). That means it’s the Jewish New Year, although confusing, it’s actually the start of the seventh month in the Hebrew calendar, so it’s the same numerical Hebrew year (5769) … Continue reading →

Last night my roommates and I had a test party. We wanted to see (1) if people would actually come and (2) whether we had enough space in our current layout to make it work. It was definitely a success. … Continue reading →

I’m back from the retreat. It was pretty much the same as the last two years, with lots of interesting talks by students and faculty, a poster session, lots of food, and a crazy party. The annual party is the … Continue reading →

The next two days are the Biophysics department retreat, which is about 75% scientific conference and 25% party. I don’t know if I’ll have an internet connection, so I may be hard to reach. Today I built something. It’s a … Continue reading →

I am searching for a lubricant. Specifically, I need a lubricant that will work well with vinyl. As you might imagine, Google returns mostly the wrong sort of answers for when I search for lubricants and vinyl. Anyway, if you … Continue reading →

I was working with another student on a project today. We started work around 11 AM. By 3 PM I was really hungry, since we still hadn’t broken for lunch, but my coworker seemed undeterred. I told him that I … Continue reading →

My timing is impeccable. It appears that yesterday, scant hours after I wrote a post about explosive quenches of superconducting electromagnets, one of the ring magnets at the LHC quenched. Interestingly, this magnet is of the same field strength, and … Continue reading →

Dear Blue State Obama Fans, Many of us who live in states like Massachusetts whose electoral outcome is not in question feel that our vote does not count. We often do not bother to go to the polls on election … Continue reading →

I mentioned that my first proposed cause for the still-unexplained steam was an uncontrolled quench. An uncontrolled quench is what happens when an MRI machine fails. The sequence is as follows: First, the liquid helium coolant begins to leak. In … Continue reading →