Day 37 - A case of the Mondays?

This morning the summer students had a talk/tour of the "submicron" building on campus. We met in the lobby at 9:00 am and a man named Nissim introduced himself, gave a brief description of the phenomenon of interference, and then took us on a tour of the upper floor.

< .science >

This included many clean rooms where various lithographies are performed (optical, photo- and e-beam) as well as his lab, where he tests samples at 10 micro-Kelvin. Brrr.

Afterwards, Maciej and I stuck around to ask some questions, me about why this building falls under the category of physics and not materials science, and Maciej about the quantum Hall effect. Nissim answered, then showed us some more equipment, like the chamber for performing molecular beam epitaxy and a JEOL electron microscope with 40-nm etching resolution, before we said our goodbyes and headed off to work.

< / science >

Pretty much as soon as I sat down and began working on more images, Professor Wagner came in and said the following, which I quote verbatim because it was highly amusing/devastating (depending upon your state of mind...me, I began the day in a good mood):

"We need to meet later, do you have some time, because I don't understand everything you did."

I think he meant that he understood some things but not everything. Or maybe by "think" I mean "hope." Whatever the case, this reconjured my nerves from yesterday, so I told him I was "relatively free," which I meant as a joke because of course all I'd be doing all day was image processing and data manipulation. He smiled and told me "late afternoon." Goody.

So I worked, then went to lunch at San Martin, meeting Ari, Zvonimir, Anya, Onur, Jordan, and later Joel. It was nice to shoot the breeze for a bit, but I was still stressed, so I headed to Stone cafeteria for an ice cream bar, and chatted with Nitzan and a friend of his. I then returned to work and continued processing. Until 7 pm. When I decided to pop my head in and see if this was the time he had in mind to meet. He told me he didn't have time, but that I wasn't doing what he wanted. Huh. So I grabbed my notebook and we discussed it. Turns out it's not so bad; I have the data he wants, but wasn't plotting the right parameters. Anyways that is how I will spend tomorrow morning, certainly.

Shortly after this meeting I left work. When I returned to Clore, I blogged in the kitchen, which bothered Zvonimir until he discovered he was being mentioned. I also chatted with Ben online and with Rachel, and after a bit we decided we wanted pizza. Jordan and Jonathan had just returned from frisbee and decided to come with us. We walked down Hertzl until we came across a kosher place (surprisingly, the first two didn't satisfy this condition), and ordered slices. Soon Dan and Maciej joined us, and we would have pushed the tables together to form one big happy group had they not been bolted to the wall.

On the way back, we stopped in a convenience store to purchase tasty beverages for the evening (Zvonimir had given me some of his money for this express purpose), then set everything down in the piano room in Clore and hung out until people began arriving for the party. Around 11:00, people really began to stick around, and soon after someone broke out a guitar and people stopped playing the piano. I hung around for a good while then headed to bed.