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.