Brain... melting...
Mar. 31st, 2004 07:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
morslaThree days in to the course, now. I left the uni at 7pm last night, and spent a pretty solid seven hours with seminars and exercises today. Guess it's lucky that I find this stuff so fascinating - if I was anything less than completely enthralled, I probably would have curled up under a table by now. The amount of thinking that my poor brain has been subjected to lately is ridiculous - I haven't had to wake up so many braincells for at least five months :P
Fission track thermochronology today, which seems to involve a lot of counting. Many pages of photomicrograph images, all showing crystal surfaces pock-marked by radioactive decay. Calibrate a 10x10 transparent grid, and then get to work counting how many fission trails appear per unit area - and start feeding the results into all sorts of equations, to work out the neutron flux/concentration of Uranium atoms in the crystal/age of the crystal, etc.
I even got carried away talking to the research staff, and missed most of my lunchbreak. In hindsight, not such a great idea - but I learnt some fascinating things. The average time it takes to "train" someone to work in the Fission Track group is nine months (!) of calibrations, and measuring a suite of "known" standards - all while being scrutinised for any trace of systematic error on the part of the human. After 9 months or so, the various researchers are confident enough to let you work on your own samples - still subject to inter-lab testing, to make sure that any variance is due to the experiment, and not the scientist.
I managed to completely miss the opening hours of the post office and library, though. Library I need, as I have to request some books from ANU (in a hurry... this report is due pretty damn soon...). The post office apparently has two parcels waiting for me to collect them - I wonder what they are. Wonder if I'll have time to check tomorrow.
Fission track thermochronology today, which seems to involve a lot of counting. Many pages of photomicrograph images, all showing crystal surfaces pock-marked by radioactive decay. Calibrate a 10x10 transparent grid, and then get to work counting how many fission trails appear per unit area - and start feeding the results into all sorts of equations, to work out the neutron flux/concentration of Uranium atoms in the crystal/age of the crystal, etc.
I even got carried away talking to the research staff, and missed most of my lunchbreak. In hindsight, not such a great idea - but I learnt some fascinating things. The average time it takes to "train" someone to work in the Fission Track group is nine months (!) of calibrations, and measuring a suite of "known" standards - all while being scrutinised for any trace of systematic error on the part of the human. After 9 months or so, the various researchers are confident enough to let you work on your own samples - still subject to inter-lab testing, to make sure that any variance is due to the experiment, and not the scientist.
I managed to completely miss the opening hours of the post office and library, though. Library I need, as I have to request some books from ANU (in a hurry... this report is due pretty damn soon...). The post office apparently has two parcels waiting for me to collect them - I wonder what they are. Wonder if I'll have time to check tomorrow.
