One can only infer that when Nate Dogg has to "regulate," that means he's shooting thugs, having various kinds of intercourse with horny sluts, and generally kicking ass. When Warren G has to "regulate," that means he's receiving a severe pistol-whipping and getting sloppy seconds from Nate Dogg's ho's. One shudders to think what life is like for Warren when he isn't regulating.

Gapminder

This site is an amazing tool for looking at global trends. you can pick the criteria and see how over the last 200 years these criteria have changed for countries all over the world. Have a look.

That Smell

The smell I have liked for all these years. The smell of warm dry earth after rain has a name. It was named by Australian scientists in 1964... it is Petrichor.
not the most poetic name, but finally the definition is validated!

The commitments

There are not too many movies that explicitly talk about dublin. But the commitments is written by a dubliner about dubliners. It is filled with good music and the type of rude ugly people that this town smells of. Not descriptive, but representative. I hate you dublin and you rock.

Education

U2

The show was pretty good. More detail tomorrow. My one gripe was all of the people with their cameras filming almost the entire show. Arms up in the air blocking everyones view. I mean, do it a bit but not whe whole freaking time! Best U2 sing alongs ever. The irish love their lads!

U2 at Croke park

Today I am going to see U2 do their 360 show. I had bought two tickets for Jules' birthday. Buit she cant be here so i am going alone. I tried to give the ticket away to the people i work with but nobody seemed to want it. It has been billed as the biggest most expensive stadium gig in history. the entire stage is made so that it sits in the middle of the crowd. So they are visible for 360 degrees. Pretty cool.
All in all it is probably best that nobody comes with me. It is so sad not having jules with me I will probably cry.

Anyway I will take the ticket along with me. if i see anyone who might like it i can give it to them. I havent been to Croke park before. It supposedly holds 80000 people. That's a lot. I hope I can see!

Robocop the first one is so good. How were al the sequels so bad?

Jules' Parents

Julie's parents have arrived. They are going for a tour of Wicklow today. Hopefully they see something they like. I am going to take them out to dinner tonight. I hope I can find somewhere that is okay. Maybe somewhere in temple bar. I want something that is nice but not too touristy. Maybe I should go out to eat more often, then I would know what the good restaurants are.

I think I might just have a little bit of a peek on the web. Or on that boards.ie site that i have been using lately...

A Moroccan place on Nassau street? Well that interests me, but maybe not Bruce and Mauveen.
A Italian fusion place near the Abbey theatre. Closer...
Mexican in Temple Bar... that actually sounds like it might be good. I will have to play it by ear, definitely would be good if I can get them to temple bar, but it might be too much of a walk. I have never seen them out and about so I don't know how mobile Mauveen is...

So Friday comes again... and apparently Jules' parents are here. I think they must have just gotten off the long plane flight so they are tired. So what do i do with myself. that is always the question on a Friday night. Not really that much to do. except stay up a little later than usual watching crappy TV. I have a movie I bought to watch. Maybe I can get myself something to drink as well. Haven't been drinking very much lately. So some vodka might be fun, i have lots of orange juice after shopping last night.

The conclusion to that boring internal monologue is: what do I do on Friday? Get drunk... and then go into work the next day because you have nothing better to do.

...and the eyes have it.

Sore Back

I took the day of yesterday because i had a sore back. I wake up in the mornings with a rictus of pain all around my lower back. By later in the day that has subsided until there is just the bruised rib pain i have.

I went to a physio yesterday to see if he had anything to say. At least he allayed my fears that it was my spine. It is just the bruised rib. but it is all swollen and inflamed. So i should have a hot shower in the morning, take neurofen and keep stretching the affected regiuons.

So basically what he is saying is just shut uyp and take it like a man. well i had to go into work t oday to turn off a bake and fill the cryostat with liquid nitrogen. I hope that I am okay for seeing Jules parents tomorrow and for going to see U2 on monday. If Jules cant make it, at leat someone has got to take advantage of the tickets.

Day after monday

God i had such a hard time getting out of bed today. My back was absolutely killing me. I don't know what happened to make it so sore but it took me all the way up until lunch to get to the point where i could leave the house and go to work. I have had a bit of a twinge from the bike accident last week but this was sudden and very unpleasant. Maybe it is the bed that i am sleeping in that is giving me problems. Anyway i am in here at work now... with a decidedly still sore back but i can do what i need to do. Jules parents come at the end of the week. so i need to get enough stuff done that i can go and hang out with them.

Anyway my parents sent me this picture today:























That's my dad there on the right when he was nineteen. This is the car of a friend that they had a bit of a pose on for this picture. Did i look like this when i was nineteen. A different type of goofy I think.

Really enjoyed this game

Babbage and Lovelace

I seem to be a fan of webcomics.. well some of them. in that vein, here is a webcomic I have been reading today about Charles Babbage, inventor of the difference engine.

but what i wanted to put a picture up of was the depiction of Isambard Kingdom Brunel.




































"Isambard Kingdom Brunel was like the Wolverine of the early Victorians. He was short, ripped, had big sideburns, smoked 50 cigars a day, AND KICKED EVERYONE’S ASS!!"

Video and Sunday

So it is Sunday today. getting another sample ready for a weeks worth of experiences. I can feel myself getting slightly closer to it working each time. So I am not getting too upset about work. I had to wait for the load lock to cool down for a couple of hours today. So I went to Grafton Street to do some shopping. I wanted to get some new shoes... maybe some cons, I liked that purple pair that i had a few years ago maybe I will try to find those. it seems that the universe does not allow me to have red sneakers. I have tried twice and they are never right. Well actually that is untrue. I have had some non-converse red shoes... so maybe it is red cons I am not allowed to have. However I only came across a Foot Locker and they were too expensive there. I also wanted to get a set of speakers for the lab so I can listen to music while I work. You cant use headphones because you need to hear what is happening. But there were none of the sort i wanted. So I ended up only getting a couple of cheapie DVDs. i got Spirit and something else with explosions. so tonight I have something to watch. Right after I get this sample ready...

Ukrain's Got Talent

From the Ukraine version of the show I saw this sand animation. A gorgeous girl doing sand animation. In real time creating pictures from sand on a bright background and she was allowed 8 minutes to do her act. The audience is in tears at times. I think it is a celebration of what variety shows like Britain's got talent could and should be.

Also getting a scratch in my throat. I hope this does not mean a cold. Filling up cryostat so i can be away all weekend just in case!

T-shirt

I have a sort of kind of sickness where i like to surf the web and look at funny t-shirts I can buy. Then I don't buy them. A couple of times I have in fact bought t-shirts off the web and have been happy with them. But often I just cant convince myself. I think i should probably just bite the bullet more often. I cant currently because you usually cant have stuff delivered to a country that is not where your CC is from. But this one |I saw today took my fancy. Must come back and get it when i can.

These are paper clips on the floor of a train in Japan. So be careful dont drop your credit card on the floor in the train.

Seminar Today

Well I sat through the how to write a grant seminar today. It covered all of the stages of the EU funding under the Framework 7 Program. We were told how politicians make policy and then how the policy is handed to the bureaucracy who design the committee that organised the grants and eventually gives money to the scientists, The interplay between these three bodies covers a forward looking time scale of 10-15 years.

A lot of the seminar was about how to write bog grants. So centre wide grants for 5-10 institutes and up to 6 million euro funding. what I was more interested in was the fellowship funding. the so-called Marie Curie fellowships which give you your own money to hire a postdoc and do your own research project ovber the course of 3 years or so. The idea of these grants is to encourage skills and mobility in young scientists. So maybe in about 6 months I will position myself for one of these grants to do some single monolayer organic small molecule spectroscopy with the LT-STM here. Who knows...
But all in all there is a shit-load of red tape to go through to apply for any type of funding. You have to compete with the best scientists in all of europe which makes me a small fish in a big pond. There are institutes like the Max Planck Institute with entire departments working full time on grant applications for it's scientists. Also inductry can apply for this type of money. Phillips is a big investor in fundamental research in europe. The next stage of science for me is yet another one of those watersheds where many of us fall by the way.

Lets hope I can jump that hurdle when i get to it.

I always thought that about that commercial.

New tips.

I had the revelation yesterday that the tip ui was using was too long. just couldn't manipulate the tip any way such that i could get it onto the surface to take a picture. So today i am etching new tips. The tip etching is done electrochemically. You dunk the tip into a bowl of NaOH, run AC through it at 10V and the NaOH etches the tungsten away until it eventually breaks at the surface into the right shape. This sounds easy but you have to make sure the length of the tip is right to within 0.1mm. This is difficult as the NaOH concentration is changing from tip to tip. and the etch conditions keep changing. say the angle of the wire to the surface of the NaOH is off... oops have to do it again!

So i have three tips now which are a little bit short... but only 0.2mm too short. i think i can use them but i want to have another couple that are exactly right to use as well. I have been at it for 4 hours now. Must keep attention for just another couple more hours... also need to get myself some new books to read tonight. It is difficult to get to sleep without a bit of reading before bed.. i find at least.

Haha a wind up bear version of Dad!

Wind-up Bear from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.

Stupid Irish

So there are some new defamation laws coming out in Ireland. From the gist of this article it seems that it will also cover blasphemy. So if you outrage someone religions with your statements about their belief you can be fined up to 25000 euro. That cant be right? Maybe i am reading it wrong...
nope it's true. Richard Dawkins has attacked it is a backwards law taking Ireland back to the stone age.

Tv Tropes

A Trope is a plot device. It does not mean that it is a bad thing. It is just a structure which is often used in TV or in any kind of story writing. These tropes have been collected together at this site. I have been reading it this afternoon while working after reading this XKCD strip.I think it appeals because it combines the fun of learning about how you have been played by TV in the past while also seeming like entertainment because it is so familiar to you.

Some youtube links

The Cully Flaug'd (1680)

What Drudgery’s here, what Bridewell-like Correction!
To bring an Old Man, to an Insurrection.
Firk on Fair Lady [,] Flaug the Fumblers Thighs [,]
Without such Conjuring th’ Devil will not rise

And while we are at it, Good old Socrates gets ridden like a pony.

Why i am at work on a sunday

Well so i don't sit at home and get drunk wile watching TV for a whole day. Tried that out yesterday and it was pretty depressing, i can tell you. At least i have the internet here and surfing the web can be reasonably pleasing. Also i needed to flash a sample for imaging tomorrow. Maybe outgas the evaporation source... still need to find a way to keep the chamber walls cool near that source.

Meanwhile some links:
webcomic

this browser game has an awesome song during the instructions

1950's home electron microscope

lil' jon vs. lazytown. pretty good mash

i feel great with nutrigrain

Monkeys may not tell the best jokes, but make up for it with the yuks!

awesome baptist drum and base

okay it's late... hometime. Back again tomorrow.

Duke nukem disease

Julie's Birthday

I am having a difficult time. Jules is really down in the dumps at the moment. She has told me that she doesn't want to come and move to Ireland with me. She says that she wants to move back to Australia. It really makes me sad. The kind of all pervasive sad where you find yourself crying for no reason. Where advertisments on TV have to be turned off so they don't get me crying again.

This is my wife. The person who along with me had pledged to create a combined unit that would stand the test of time. Or at least the test of a long long time. Because of work and travelling we have not really been together for 3 months now. I knew there would be stress involved, but not like this. I though there was more strength to us.

I also think that this would be mitigated if Jules and i were together here. A lot of thing seem better when you have someone to share it with. But Jules' natural instinct when she is feeling bad is to retreat inside and blame everything around her. She thinks this is a good way of dealing with things. Well in the past for her it has been a good damage control mechanism. But, there is only so long you can keep running away.

I haven't been able to speak with her for more than a week now. She never answers my calls and i only get terse SMS messages saying how unhappy she is and how she hates everything. I have to be very careful to say the right things. I if I get upset, or if I try to tell her to cheer up I make her angry. I am honestly at a loss as what to do. Obviously I want her to be happy, but I also want to salvage my own happiness. If she needs to leave me and the British isles then she has to. But that will pretty much break me in the process.

All my time living here in Ireland has been in limbo, implicitly based upon the idea that Jules would come and join me when she got her passport back. If and when Jules gives it all up and goes back to Australia I will have to deal with: being alone, a broken heart and still with the ever present stress of performing at work. I suppose I will also try to beat myself up about having had an absolutely pathetic marriage also.

Look there in the previous paragraph, I am already preparing myself for the inevitable downfall. This kind of pre-cauterisation is bad. I am emotionally preparing myself for the rending and pain, but if it were to ever work out in any good way I would already have partially severed myself emotionally. Lose-lose situation.

Now to bring it to a sort of a head today, I have to arrange to sort out Jules' parents to fly from the Ireland to the UK to see Jules. For her birthday. She hates her birthday and doubly so now that she is projecting all of her current negative emotions unto it. So what do I say? Sure I will book a flight for you guys but Jules doesn't want me there, I think she is going to leave me an our marriage will be over. In fact I don't think she wants any of us there.

It is not her fault. She is really having a hard time. She has another persons shit heap of a family falling around her ears and a lot of that is rubbing off on her. She is living with the separated father and the kids seem to be imprinting the mother that they need upon her. I cant begin to guess how Jules is coping. From the little I hear she is not coping very well at all. But what do I know? With every passing day I seem a little further away and it is harder to understand what she might be thinking.
It cant go on like this.
What is going to happen?
I cant control anything, not even myself...

furry walking man

MTV International / Mister Furry from Universal Everything on Vimeo.

Kobayashi toppled

Kobayashi defeated by Joey Chestnut. This is news to me. I had thought that Kobayashi, six time Fourth of July Hot Dog Eating Contest winner had retired from competitive eating after suffering a throat injury. However I was wrong. Kobayashi is famous for the "Kobayashi Shake" to force food down his oesophagus faster and also the "Soloman" method of heating hot dogs by breaking them in half and dunking in water.


So a legend has been defeated! But even the legend could not defeat a giant Kodiak bear!

A visitor

So Pete is back from Australia with his visa. He says he might come and visit me one of these days. I think I would like that. I have only had my family come visit me so far. Now if i could only find a weed dealer in this godforsaken country.
Really any visitor would be very nice. I am pretty lonely here.

Classic Arnie.

"Why dont they just call him girl george? It would cut down on all the confusion."

Homosexual Autohebephile?

"Am I seriously suggesting that Michael Jackson was a homosexual autohebephile whose erotic goals included resembling Peter Pan and having sex with pubescent boys? I sure am. If I am right, then somewhere there are images of Peter Pan that Michael Jackson brought to a plastic surgeon. There are also computer-generated images of the surgeon's plans for Jackson's face. But I am less certain that Peter Pan is the inspiration of Michael Jackson's plastic surgeon than about the general idea that Jackson was trying to be a pubescent male."


Well MJ, I always stood by you. May you and your legend grow ever weirder!

Now I dont have to come up with a topic

In an article on wired it is outlined for us the 7 main types of blog post. I think i probably focus too much on types 1,6 &7. Maybe i should start trying to be outraged at things. I think i am plenty outraged enough.

Sat-bitch

First post of the day. First page on slashdot is this article about the use of satnav destroying local knowledge about the roads. It talks about how the first real usable satnav was a british invention. I suppose that explains why the first time i found it necessary was while trying to navigate the barely controlled mania of the British roads system. Or maybe that was because driving in England was the first time i had driven away from home soil?

Anyway it reminded me of one occasion time while driving to see my extended family for christmas, the satnav was a bit slow to update and i was a bit slow to respond. This ended up with a 10 mile detour on the m11 to turn around. I was absolutely furious. I still cant believe it. I spoke more harshly to jules than i had for a long time. All because of a mistake and this little thing that tells me where to go. Now ultimately it is a small price to paty for the confidence to always know where you are going. But it is amazing how such a little thing can get you so infuriated.

This article. Which by the way is a puff piece for a new book discussed this briefly saying it was a male thing to get angry with the authoritarian navigator. So maybe i am not alone. Maybe the voices of the navigator should me more sexy. Guys will be less likely to get angry at that. who knows. Like all technology though, the satnav needs a better human interface.

STM Spectroscopy

Well everything can't go swimmingly. While i managed to get lovely images of the surface with atomic resolution. The second task of the day seems to be a little more difficult to accomplish. This was to obtain stable Scanning Tunneling Spectroscopy curves from the silicon surface. This should show an approximation of the Density of States. I woudl be able to see the energy levels of the surface and of the bulk filled and empty states. However it seems this miught be a bit beyond my capabilities tonight. The probelm is there is some vibrations within my system. Coming from who knows where. There are a lot of things that hang off the whole system. It could be any of them. It could also be from the trainline which runs just next to the labs where i work. A lot of effort has been made to make sure that the vibrations are neutralized. There is the concrete block with pneumatic ssuspension the machine sits on, then there are the air legs that the STM floats on and finally a spring suspension unit that the STM head hangs off of. So who knows? tomorrow i will have to pin down every possible source of vibration in the system. Yee Hah. thats an exciting one...

Also one of the things on the electronics rack makes a beep about every 20 minutes or so. I cant figure out which one it is. Very annoying!

Pretty watch

This is a very pretty watch. The motion looks very complicated yet elegant. Maybe not an every day watch. You dont want a watch upstaging you! I think jules woudl like it too. The name is particularly distinguished also :Ulysse Nardin Royal Blue Tourbillion.

STM imaging

Today I am imaging the silicon (001) surface. Now i kind of know how to do everything i can get myself an okay surface and start to get the finessing of the tip right. Now this shows the kind of thing you want to see: regular crystalline structure over the surface. The tip is still a bit dull as i cannot see the individual atoms on the surface but i have plenty of time to work on that. I need to get it so that the tip is well shaped but still robust enough not to become easily deformed. You do this by pulsing the voltage, touching the tip to the surface, making it oscillate.. lots of little tricks to try and bring the tip that one step close to perfection. This is the dark art of STM. BLACK MAGIC!

This guy looks like he is having fun

The whole red and balck motif is cool.

Also this, while geeky is really pretty cool!

Furniture for apartment

Looking through catalogues for some nice furniture to fill out the spareseness of my apartment I came across this.

I think i may have to look into acquiring one. It would make quite the conversation piece!

Liquid nitrogen fun.

While decanting liquid nitrogen i decided to see just how much was coming out by spraying it onto the floor. Lots of fun clouds of water vapour.

Dewar is empty.

Oh well, the small LN dewar is empty. I cant cool down the manipulator arm...
In a way i am kind of dissappointed. At home there is nothing except all of the dishes and some indifferent TV. I am trying to invent things to do to keep me here. I keep trying to ring Jules because here I can talk on the phone for free. But she is never there. Its a pity because it really make me happy to hear from her. I only seem to get through about once a week. Well i can keep trying.

Maybe i can now decant some LN from the big dewar into the small one. That would allow me to flash my sample today. Lets see how that goes... Kill some time.

Yes so Decant to the dewar is what i did. Now the sample is cold and i am in the process of flashing it. The pressure is bad for this kind of thing. But when i feel the flange for the Ion Gauge it is almost too hot to touch. I think this is why the reading is out. I will go by the Mass spec to adjust the flash.

the matrix?

Destino

Two artistic greats... produce for you. In collaboration, from beyond the grave. It was supposed to be in fantasia, but they only managed to produce 17 deconds of it in life. But now this collaboration has been completed. Salvadore Dali and Walt Disney... Destino.

sTRING tHEORY

For the first time ever a testable prediction from string theory. First time ever in science.

Forty years ago.

BBC4 is showing a whole pile of documentaries to commemorate the forty years since landing on the moon. Still just as significant. We may have seen further, gone faster and known more. But you stil get a feeling of importance. No one has gone further. Technology moves so fast now that it is still a testament to this achievement that so much time has passed and there is nothing more to show. Impressed... Still.

Surfin'

A ship called the 'Success' had a competition for seamen who could claim success with seimen with the other seamen.... where, which port? Where else? Singapore!

Michael Jackson had the cooles toys. I think we knew this already.

YES! RoboGeisha...

Liquid Nitrogen Shower

Somer things are best not done. Such as standing underneath a shower of liquid nitrogen, which is spurting from a geyser in front of you with no safety equipment on. These are the events that you usually wear goggles and gloves to ward off. But i trusted in my over pressure valve to pop off if the pressure got to high. However it was frozen shut and when i took off the filling tube. boom a beautiful cloud all over me and the machine. If i had a picture of it it woudl look amazing.
In repsonse i did the appropariate thing for cryogen showers. flailed my arms wildly and cursed. It has kept me safe so far... and i stand by it.

Kill them with FIRE!
Well yes i suppose it is a rebirth of a sad annoyiong old meme. But i could not look away!

LT STM

Here it is pizza oven removed.

Saturday, surely not?

Went and saw a movie yesterday afternoon. Blood: The last vampire. it is a film adapatation of an (admittedly) lackluster manga. And what can i say...? It sucked. The plot was paper thin. The blood, while making an attempt to fly around in manga-style excess just looked like jam. For some reason they demons just looked like the vampires from buffy. And finally; the story is about a good demon who kills bad demons with a sword. So, the main reason i thought it would be good was all the japanese sword-fighting scenes. But they did that shitty thing that all modern movies do now, which is to show you nothing at all. Just blinding you with lots of flashes and jump cuts all over the place. Blerk. Boring!

So i went home and i watched a DVD i had bought for 4 euro. Some other japanese half CGI half real action movie. I now know why it was so cheap. While it had some very nice steampunk CGI and the integration between the real action and the CGI was not too painful the story was painfully long and incomprehensible. It was some sort of comment about socialisim and the cultural revolution. And how war is bad.. mmkay? But that is my guess, the endless versions of Pachelbel's cannon while mud smeared asian men in armour with impossibly high cheekbones cradled immaculate gothic lolita heroins and whisper about the power of love was a bit stilted. To say the least.

In other news, my bake is finished. It was going to finish on Friday. I thought today was friday... but after some convincing by a coworker it turns out it is saturday. Hmm seem to have lost track of time somewhere there.

Anyway i managed to break a plug in the bakeout but it doesn't seem to have influenced the functionality. One of the readouts just doesn't work any more. I think i will live.

The mass spec says there is no oxygen. There is however, some hydrogen, a little nitrogen, some water, some hydorcarbons and a bit of argon. All in all this is an okay result. Maybe a bit more water than i would like. but further degassing of the elements might reduce the water content.
The pressure is 4.4x10^(-10) and there is probably another 20 hours or so before everything is cool. So we might crack the 10^(-11) barrier. Otherwise... poop, all this work for nothing.

Back in here again tomorrow to see how the pressure is. But now off home, a couple of beers and some TV.
What an exciting life!

Q: What is the physicist's definition of a vector space?
A: A set V such that for any x in V, x has a little arrow drawn over it.

Dangers of science

Well as i mentioned before, my lab is hit by a fucking tropical heatwave. I have been into my
bake and opening valves to the ion pumps while the thing is still at
150degrees. Sweating like a pig with insuklating gloves on. but not enough i got burned along my arm.
Being burned by a UHV system is a new one. So now in the
course of science I have been sliced, bludgeoned, pinched, burned, frozen, dissolved, gassed unconsious, electrically shocked...
any else i can think of...

If an idea is any good it is on the verge of being stupid.

Well i have been buying up 2nd hand DVDs from rental places and also from Cash Converters lately, it lets me buy them for 3-4 euro each and they generally have an interesting random selection which forces me to go and choose titles that i would not usually choose. Usually whne choosing a movie I am overcome with laziness and i dont want to watch something that would make me think. I dont know why that is. Something male I guess. But I often go for big budget movies with action... explosions.
Come to think of it, it is probably something to do with the way that cinema is seen. It is only really those big budget action movies that get a major release...or are something that you would want to get gouged at the cinema to go an see. Anything else i always say to myslef... i will watch that in my own home. it doesn't gain anything form being on the big screen. So there I go. I have answered my own question.

But this trend of buying shitty action movies is starting to drop off. As the DVDs on my shelf pile up abd i find better places to buy dvd's from they are getting a little bit better.
All this has preamble been leading up to me mentioning the movie I saw last night. The Science of Sleep by Michel Gondry. Very good. Totallly enjoyable. It is often that i find myself scrutinizing a movies themes and technique and it gets in the way of the story. In the case of this movie, it was just confusing enough that i gave up on the analysis but still accessable enough that i was engrossed. A sort of romance story about a strange guy who has difficulty distinguishing his dreams from reality. It really got a hold on that kind of out of control familiarity of dreams...

I usually hate the extra things they bundle on a DVD but for once i watched them.

My machine in its bake out box

Looks a bit like a pizza oven.

new blog

So there is this little feature on my mobile phone that allows me to send pictures that i take directly to a blogspot blog. So being the amateur technophile i thought i would give it a go. And here it is. You can see that i have got a couple of pictures sitting up here already.

Fun!

Anyway i have very low expectations for this blog being something that i do regularly but we shall see what happens.

A little bit about today.
I am up here in my office mooching about. I have a paper from my work at Cambridge which i should be pouring a lot more effort into but i just dont feel the motivation.

Instead I have been spending a fair bit of time in the lab recently, getting proficient with my new LT-UHV-STM/AFM.

But not right now. For most of this week it will be horridly hot down in the lab because i am baking the machine. This is a procedure you have to do every once in a while after you have done repairs to get everything clean again. You see, the machine is an Ultra High Vacuum System. This measn that is operates at very low pressures, like upi would get in space. To achive this you have to get the machine very clean. Oddly, to do this you heat the machine up while you are pumping on it and all of the gunk evaporates off the walls of the chamber and gets pumped out. So, when it cools down this same gunk doesn't mess up all the pressure inside.
So in this way when the system cools down I hope the pressure will be somewhere in the 10^(-11) millibar range which means that is is 0.0000000000001% of an atmosphere.

But how do i get the pressure down to that very low value? Well there are thhree types of pump that tha re used to get to sequentially lower pressures. The first type of pump known as a scroll pump is a simple kind of pump that operates in the most intuative fashion. The pressure of the atmospherer is such that it behaves like one cwoudl expect from real life. It consists of two spiral membrains that move relative to one another such that they enclose a space that initially is at the inlet of the pump and ends up at the outles. It is sort of like a spiral piston.


This type of pump can get to pressures of about 10^(-4) mbar







The next type of pump is called a turbomolecular pump. It operates very similarly to a jet engine. it has a serie of fan blade which are alternately spinning (rotor) and fixed(stator) the rotating blades impart momentum to the gas molecules. Due to the angle of the rotor blade the momentum that is imparted forces the gas down the pump towards the exhaust. The turbopump blades rotate at about 1000 rpm.
For this type of pump we start thinking about the gas as a suspension of discrete particles that have momentm and travel through space with only occasional colissions with other gas particles. This begins to occurs at the type of pressure that can be achive with scroll pumps. So with the scroll pump attached to the turbopump the turbopump can start to work. This gets down to pressures of 10(-7) mbar. maybe even better if everything is nice and clean.


The final type of pump is called the ion pump. It has no moving parts. Just a stream of electrons and a magnetic field. The occasional gas molecule flying through space is smashed with a beam of electrons. This cases the molecule to become ionized. That is, one of it's electrons is missing and so it has a net charge. Now that it has a sharge it is susceptibvle to the magnetic field and is pushed down into the bottom of the pump which is made of titanium. The charged molecule smashes into the titanium and reactes with it sticking to it. The impact also splashes some of the titanium away burying adjacent stuck gas molecules. The Ion pump can only start working at pressures of 10^(-6) mbar becase if there is too much gas the titanium very quickly becomes saturated with molecules. The pressures that the ion pump can achive are 10^(-11) and beyond. However it is difficult to reliably measure pressures below 10^(-11).

Eh but that is enough about pumps. Maybe som other things in my next post.

My wife

Just the other weekend i turned thirty. I went un london and met up with Jules for a long weekend. Here she is al Piccadilly circus where i bought myself a new Jacket.

Tall ship

I saw this on the Liffey a couple of weeks ago and wanted to try uploading it.