matterhacker

Wired has a nice picturesque story about the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC). Cool place. I did some research there at some point in my career. The whole complex is like something out of a James Bond movie. Catwalks and all kinds of crazy electronics all over. It’s probably most useful as a synchrotron source. You can do a lot of really neat stuff with high energy x-rays… especially in relation to structural molecular biology. I probably should have stayed in that line of research. It’s a lot more applicable.

Cool paper in nature today from the research group of Prof. Z.L. Wang at Georgia Tech. They’ve made arrays of nanowire fibre’s from which they can generate (obviously small amounts of) electricity. Pretty neat nevertheless. Reminds me of this cool research that came out of Cornell a few years ago that used trace amounts of radioactive material near a micron-scale cantilever as a battery.

A comment on a post made on the Angry Physics Blog reads:

“The difference is that the typical probationary period for academe is 6 years or so; a typical corporate probationary period is six to eighteen months.”

the unfortunate truth… probably necessary, but extremely harsh when an academic doesn’t cut it.

Damn you MATLAB! Some notes I googled up that helped me with setting up the output of fft() in matlab.