Finished!

Phew!!  I just finished printing my masters thesis: A new method for high-precision microsampling and Sm/Nd dating of zoned garnets.  Clocked in at 229 pages all told.  And now I'm sleepy.  Printing this was the final task in completing my degree.  I am now finished with my masters but still need to spend the next few days getting my papers submitted to the journals.

The 6 piles of paper in this photo represent the last 2.5 years of my life.  It's been a long twisty journey, but it's been absolutely worth it.

I feel thrilled.  Grad school has been a life changing experience for me.  I have met some great people including my amazing girlfriend.  I've learned an enormous amount about the particular science I've been working on, but also about research in general, what's important in life, and how to accomplish tasks and not lose sight of the broad goals (most of the time).  I know now that this science gig is what I want to do with my life.  I've been so lucky that my work has actually panned out the way we were hoping it would.  I know that this isn't necessarily the norm in science but I'll enjoy it while it lasts.

I couldn't have asked for a better advisor than Ethan.  He has truly been an inspiration and support to me.  He knows when to push me and when to let me figure things out for myself.  We have a fantastic working relationship that I hope will continue to grow in the future.  I'm proud to call him my mentor and my friend.

Passed

Thanks to everyone for the well wishes and for watching my defense last week.

I successfully defended my masters and am now working on the revisions.  Shouldn't be too much longer and then I'm off to Wisconsin next week for about 36 hours before I go to D.C. for Christmas.

That's about it going on right now.  Not too much exciting.  Oh, I bought myself an xbox 360 last week and it's waiting in Wisconsin for me right now.  So that will be fun when I get out there.

Hooray!!

Hooray!!

I turned in my thesis to my committee yesterday.  It turned out to be 210 pages long, all of which is pure gold I'm sure.  I also met with the person in the grad school in charge of theses and she approved the formatting for mine.  So now I'll only have to rewrite stuff, not rewrite and format the whole thing.

My defense is Dec. 1 and now I just have to make my talk and prepare for the defense.  I don't think it will be too hard because I've already made all the figures and I already know what I'm going to say, but I still have to do it.

The most exciting thing that's happened though is that we've figured out how to do a live broadcast.  So, we'll be doing a webcast of my defense live as it's happening.  I'll also probably post a video of the defense onto the blog when it's over.  The webcast comes courtesy of Nora, one of Ethan's grad students.

The defense is happening at 10 am EST (8am mountain, 3pm Greenwich) on Monday Dec. 1.  Tune in right here (video below) for what is sure to be an exciting event.  If the video below isn't working, try going directly to the site here.

Defense

As some of you already know, I've scheduled my masters defense.  It all goes down Dec. 1 at 10 am.  For those of you who haven't already gotten the message, if you're in Boston come on by.  I'll reveal all the world shattering data that I've collected but have been hiding from the general public.  Hope to see you there.  If you're gonna come and you don't know where to go, let me know.

This too shall pass

That's one of my favorite phrases.  It says a lot.  And, it did indeed pass. That is, I passed my kidney stone this afternoon.  My kidney is still a bit sore and I'm not sure if I still have some more chunks in there, but at the very least the big part is gone.

I've learned a bit about kidney stones today.  They're apparently calcium oxalate.  On webmineral there's no  listing of the anhydrous mineral. There are however three hydrous species: whewellite, weddellite and caoxite with 1, 2, and 3 moles water each.  The funniest one is the whewellite because that is described as forming in "low-temperature hydrothermal solutions...releasing methane."  That sounds just like my situation :)

I took some photos of it on the microscope at school today.  It certainly looks like a clump of minerals.  

They told me that it was about 2mm.  You can see it's clearly 3-4mm.  There are two distinct parts.  One is a clump of jagged pointy minerals.  The other part is a concentric part that looks a lot like an ooid.  

Clearly it must have been in me for a while to have formed that kind of deposit.

I'm supposed to take this to a urologist so he can analyze it and tell me what caused it.  But, we can analyze stuff like this in my lab.  We can measure calcium isotopes on the TIMS; we could put it in the XRD to see what minerals are there; as you know where there is calcium, there's usually strontium so we could measure the strontium isotopes on the TIMS. Eric suggested I should measure the strontium isotopes of it and then measure the isotopes of Rockstar (which I was drinking almost every day for a while), beer or chicken Ka Prao.  I wonder what a urologist is going to measure on it.

Ouch!

I woke up at 6am today with excruciating pain in my abdomen.  I didn't know if I drank too much last night and my liver exploded, if I was gassy, if I had slept weird and tweaked a muscle....Whatever it was it hurt a LOT.  I tried everything I could think of for about an hour or so with little effect.  I tried going for a walk, lying in a different bed, took some advil (but mainly for the alcohol headache) etc.  I tried taking a shower, but nothing was working.  Finally I called 911 and got an ambulance to the hospital.

The nurses and doctor in the ER were able to very quickly diagnose that I had a kidney stone.  This, ladies and gentlemen, is one if not the most painful things i've ever felt.  The cause of kidney stones is largely dehydration so they kept me at the hospital with an IV drip on.  I ended up getting three liters of solution.  They told me there's nothing to do for it but have lots of fluid and take medicine for the pain.  While I was there they gave me a shot of medicine I don't remember the name of, 2 shots of morphine and a percocet before I left as well as a prescription for percocet.

It also turns out that I don't have any insurance right now.  I assumed I was going to get my BU insurance because I'm still a student here but I don't have it.  I'm not sure what the bill's going to be but I'm guessing it won't be cheap.  Although, they did give me more drugs than I think I need and this one's got a high street value.  So maybe I'll peddle the extras to pay the hospital.  Ironic.

Wesley, nooooo!!!

They tell me that I'm a bad influence on the boy.  They tell me not to give him any alcohol because they think I'm a drunkard (or druncle since I'm his uncle).  What they don't know is that this boy is already wanted by the FBI for questioning in over a dozen schemes including money laundering, bootlegging and running a speakeasy.

People used to talk about the parties held down at Whiskey Wes'.  They would tell stories of the youngster glad handing with thugs and police chiefs.  One story describes how in the same evening Wesley "the Wombat" Pollington won an arm wrestling competition, outran 20 police cars with a trunk full of moonshine, and had dinner at Judge Tapenny's house.  And all this before he was three feet tall.

We may never know what became of this miniature mogul, this crib-sized Capone, but one thing we do know is that his actions were not influenced by his handsome, red-bearded uncle.  It has been told in multiple biographies of the boy how he left his loving family's home and fell in with a bad crowd.  How he learned to live it tough on the streets and eventually used that pitbull-like tenacity to dominate the underground world of women and booze.

Best of luck Wombat, wherever you are.

please note, all of the statements above are false...except for the fact that his uncle is very handsome.

Not much new

So, there's not much new going on right now that's worth writing about.  I'm doing lots of calculations and making lots of spreadsheets to figure out my data.  It's looking excellent and there's some exciting stuff showing up, but I want to get things finalized and figured out before I let the world know what we've found.

Posts might be a little spread out over the next few days while I work on this stuff or until something exciting happens.  Stay tuned, leave comments, something big is coming in the next couple of months!

The wedding was great!

It's true...the wedding was great.  We had pretty bad weather on Thursday when we arrived.  We had massive waves and rain blowing sideways.  It was a tropical storm passing through that actually became a hurricane a few days later when it was further north.It was mostly sunny on Friday for a pre-wedding bbq, then was a little drizzly in the evening during the rehearsal dinner.  But by Saturday, when the wedding was, the weather was beautiful.  It was 80 degrees, sunny, perfect weather.  The wedding itself was really nice, the church was very pretty.  The reception was held at the yacht club on the island with cocktails by the pool, then dinner inside.  Very very nice.  Annette looked absolutely beautiful and they are one of the best couples I've seen.

Good luck Annette and Bobby!!

Yeah, it really is that good

I finished collecting data on my garnet today.  I have amassed a fantastic compilation now.  I called my advisor to tell him about it and so I could hear his reaction on the phone when he saw the figure I had sent.  Here's a few things he said about it while we were talking:"historic data set" "incredible proof of concept" "best argument ever that shows that garnet Sm/Nd works"

So, yeah...I'm pretty excited about that.  Now I can get to the real work of figuring out what it all means.  Oh dear.

New barrel!!

Well, I finished all the neodymium samples today. Everything is looking great!  I've been able to calculate a few ages so far and they are awesome.  I can't tell you quite how awesome they are just yet in case someone steals my data before I publish it........just kidding, they're outstandingly awesome; to our knowledge they are the best garnet ages from sample sizes this small.  Some of them are only 2 nanograms, and all are less than 12 nanograms of Nd.

So, I changed the barrel today.  The cold trap was still full of liquid nitrogen so we had to take that off and put the other one on.  When you have a cold trap in a machine under vacuum nothing condenses on the outside, but when you bring that machine up to atmospheric pressure, water from the air freezes to the cold trap almost immediately.  The outside of the trap gets really really cold and we have to use special gloves to hold it.  I didn't get any pictures of removing the trap, but here's a picture of it just afterwards.

You can see ice is already forming on it just a few minutes after coming to atmospheric pressure.  Check out all that nitrogen venting out!  That's also the gloves I use...they look kind of like incredible hulk hands.

Here's a photo of the trap after a few more minutes.

It's got a few millimeters of frost on it at this point.  You can see a bit of nitrogen still steaming near the bottom and out of the top.

Early night home tonight....leaving at 9pm!  woo hoo!!!  Although, this early night is also the end of 60 hours in the lab.....sooooo.....not that early.

That's all for now.  See you tomorrow, hopefully with all my new ages collected!

Sleepy

Hi all,

It's 3:30 Monday morning, I've been in the lab for 42 hours now (with a break for dinner on Saturday and some football on Sunday night).

Things are going excellently!!!  I'm currently collecting data on the 11th of my 12 samples!  The precision on the first 10 range from great to world-record, so that's pretty good.  :)  This sample is looking like it's going to give us good data as well.  I still need to measure some additional information to calculate the ages of the garnet, but these 12 are by far the most important and the most difficult to run...so it should be coasting from here.

One of these days I'll post a blog about what's going on in my life that isn't work related (not much, but there are a few things), but for now....as I promised in a previous post, here's a quick description of the TIMS:  a sample of a pure (well, pure-ish) element is loaded onto a filament that is exactly like a light bulb filament.  We heat up the filament by passing a current through it and turn the sample into ions.  These ions are passed through a magnetic field created by this 937lb electromagnet

From the magnetic field the ion beams are bent and separated by their masses.  Imagine two cars coming into a sharp turn.  One, a Ferrari, will take the turn much tighter while the other, a Mack truck, will not be able to turn as quickly and will make a much wider turn.  It's exactly the same principle with mass spectrometry.  Light ions get bent to the inside of the flight tube and heavy ions to the outside.  From there the isotopes are collected separately and the ratio can be calculated (discussion of this point will be saved for a later time).

This is where we load that barrel of samples we saw in the previous post.

Because we have to run at a very high vacuum, we have two vacuum pumps attached to the machine below where my finger is pointing in the last picture.  To help these out and to get a much stronger and more consistent vacuum we use liquid nitrogen.  The liquid nitrogen goes into the machine and literally freezes the water, carbon dioxide and other molecules out of the air in the machine, leading to lower vapor pressure.  This silver ball is full of liquid nitrogen.

This is the computer I use to run the instrument.  Dude, it's a Dell!

These lines I'm pointing at represent the amounts of each isotope I'm collecting at that time.  In this case the highest blue one (trust me, it's blue) represents the ion neodymium-150 + oxygen-16.

And this is what I look like after 42 hours in the lab (note the smile....things are going that well):

Sample 11 is running itself nicely.  I'm off to bed (well, a sleeping bag on the floor near the TIMS).  One more sample when I wake up and then it'll just be a short hop, skip and a jump until I get my masters (somewhat exaggerated).

It's coming

Got some good data yesterday.  Will give more details soon.

Madison > Boston

Here's one reason why Madison is better than Boston: Buses.  Both cities have 'em, but they only really work well in one.....Madison.  In Madison there is a published schedule and......amazing.....they stick to it!  In Boston most of the buses have an "every 10 minutes" type of schedule.  This looks great because there must be frequent buses, but the problem with this is that it basically works on average timing.  So it is not at all uncommon to wait 40 minutes, then 4 buses all come at the same time....so you get an average of a bus every 10 minutes.  This is clearly a problem.

In Madison there are "less" buses, but what they have is a schedule that they stick to.  You can look in the schedule and see that a bus is going to pass your house at 4:15, then go outside at 4:12 and catch the bus.  Today I read the schedule for a bus in Boston that has a real schedule (not a frequency schedule) and waited half an hour after the bus was supposed to show up.

Ah well.  Guess I'm walking for now.

Stay tuned

Finished loading the TIMS today.  All the samples for my garnet are loaded on this barrel.  This weekend I'm going to analyze all this and hopefully have some interesting results very soon.

This is what the barrel of samples looks like

The samples are loaded on filaments (exactly like light bulb filaments) and then ionized using heat...you'll be hearing more about thermal ionization mass spectrometers (TIMS) in the next few days I'm sure.  The samples in the photo with the holes in them are the most important parts.  The samples that don't have the holes I only need moderately good data on.

Short day today...only 13 hours in the lab so far and it's looking like I'm going to be out of here in the next few minutes.  Hooray!!

Sooooooooo close now

I just finished running my "last" set of columns!!!  I say "last" because I finished running all the "important" samples today.  When I get back from the wedding I'll have a couple of samples to run, just to clarify some points that I already suspect.

This is very exciting!  Here's a photo of the final product

To my knowledge this is the most columns that have been run at once in our lab at BU.  These take about 10 hours each to run from set up to finish, but luckily we can run them simultaneously rather than in sequence!  The second and third rows (red and yellow caps) hold the culmination of the last two years of my work and life.  In the next few days we'll find out how well things go and if it has all been worth it (all signs point to yes from some earlier data).

I'm tired now though, 15 hours in the labs is a long time.  Same again tomorrow?  Maybe.  At least it won't be running columns though!!!

Soon.....

I miss Ellen a ton.  That's all.

To smurf or not to smurf

I'm in the lab today, running columns.  Things are looking pretty good so far.  Gonna be a late night, but it was a late start...so ah well.

My advisor thinks that my beard

might be getting a bit wild and contributing to some part of the blank problem we've been having.  While there's certainly some validity to this idea, it's also possible that this is just another case of rabid anti-beard discrimination.

In any case, I decided that I would try to cover things up a bit and see if that made a difference.  To that end I decided to wear a respirator to cover the beard and a shoe-cover-bootie as a hair-net.

This may or may not work at all.  You can see that while the respirator helps a little, there is still a good amount of beard sticking out.  We'll see how things turn out.  Jez thinks that I should wear the bootie with the toes facing forward.

While this does add a much higher level of Smurf-like hilarity, it also leads to more material hanging over the chemistry I'm trying to keep clean and may therefore be a little counter-productive.

Perhaps I should wear it at a jaunty angle, like a beret.

Happy Birthday to me

I'm now back in Boston after having spent 48 hours in transit trying to make a trip that Eric made in 6 hours.  I spent my entire birthday in the Las Vegas airport getting rolled over from flight to flight the entire day.  It wasn't until 10pm, after a total of 37 hours at the airport, that I finally got a flight.  When I got on the plane, the host got on the microphone and said "Would passenger Mr. Anthony Pollington please ring his flight attendant call button."  I thought, what now?  Are they going to kick me off?  After I rang it the flight attendant said "Ladies and gentlemen, it's that man's birthday and he's been trying to get on this flight for two days."  The plane then clapped and sang me a lackluster "Happy Birthday."  I finally got back to Boston at 11 am and got to work at 12.

Things are going pretty well in the office here.  I have a ton of work to do getting columns and analyses run, but hopefully I will have everything locked up by the end of next week.

I also found out today that we got a package from the people we rented our moving van from charging $450 for a dent that we got from hitting a tree.  We had purchased insurance with a $0 deductable and when we turned in the car the checking in agent looked at it and said we would be fine and the insurance will cover it.  So the package we got says that since we hit an overhanging object that voids the insurance.  The tree wasn't overhanging...it was from the side; and what's the point of having insurance that only covers certain collisions?  We understood it that we could basically total the van and everything would be fine.....not so!  So, I'm going to call Budget tomorrow and try to get this charge removed.  I'm feeling bad because if I can't get it removed, Ellen says she'll pay it for now.  This trip to Utah has tapped out most of my money.  I have a little left to last me two weeks until pay day....but there's certainly not enough to pay 1) rent in Wisconsin, 2) rent in Boston, 3) collision on a van that we had full insurance on.  I will get reimbursed for all the purchases I made doing field work, but who knows when?  This sucks.

On a lighter note though....I love Ellen.  Check out her blog.  It's much less whiny than this one.

First entry

Hi all,  Welcome to my adventure into the blogosphere.  This will be a place for you to hear about all the wild and boring things that are going on in my life.

Right now I'm sitting in the airport at Las Vegas, after having been in the airport for over 24 hours right now.  Not sure when I'm going to get out of here.  Hopefully sometime today, but no guarantees.

This last week I spent collecting sandstones in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.  Eric came out and we camped, collected rocks, and almost crashed our car a number of times.  It was very exciting and a great trip.  When I get some good info from the rocks I'll let you all know what we found.  We carried an 8 pound sledge hammer all over the field with us and didn't use it once.  It cost me $140 excess baggage to take that hammer and it burst holes in two duffle bags.  Lousy hammer!