Sheeple....

I read on Slashdot ([link]) that scientists have genetically engineered sheep to be "15% human" ([link]) on the molecular level.

This holds great benefit, as organ transplants from animals to humans would have less chance of rejection due to similarity. However, I wonder who got the 15% sheep?

My experience at the 2007 SCIPP Internship

There are integral times of growth vital to young men and women hoping to join the ranks of the worlds scientists. Although growth is never guaranteed, many of us still try for it. Some are even lucky enough to be selected, out of many applicants or groups, to valuable internships, like the one at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics in UC Santa Cruz. The privilege of working on college level experiments before attending college expands the experience of many interns lucky enough to get the internship. Even if people split off into semi-isolated groups, a complaint I heard this year, it is interesting to note that everyone must work together to make both of the highlight experiments, ADOM and Muon Lifetime, work.

ADOM is the Aerial Detector of Muon, a small muon scintillator with two photomultiplier tubes at opposing ends and a Quarknet DAQ board with a radio transmitter all carried on a gondola below a weather balloon. ADOM's purpose is to measure or count how many muons excite the scintillator. On the ground, one might then dissect the times from the data to figure out the muon count rate.

The Muon Lifetime Experiment is a set of four large muon scintillators attached to a Quarknet DAQ board. Its purpose is to look for the decays of muons by measuring the times between the end of one muon detection and the start of another, within a certain range of time.

Although this year, the Muon Lifetime Experiment did not run, the ADOM experiment did. The days leading up to the launch of ADOM required teamwork and feedback never seen in this years group. And that teamwork appeared, with each member reporting back to an appointed leader or manager, and the end run result was the launch of ADOM.

I am one of the lucky, talented interns here with others at the SCIPP 2007 Quarknet Internship. We all applied the same way, along with other applicants, but this group fit the mold needed to make a more successful year. During the first week, it was chaos. Not one intern really felt that they had an area of expertise. At the end of the week, Steve Kliewer, the head teacher of the program, held lengthy interviews with each intern, and assigned them to different projects, with or without a partner.

What did I do? What were my duties? Let me tell you. I am the theorist. It is my job to be able to interpret the data, and be able to hash it out to others in a meaningful way. Although it sounded simple in the beginning, I found that to explain data, I
needed to find a way of collecting and analyzing it. Looking at previous years methods, I saw the potential for fast analysis programs written in Python. I discussed with Mr. Kliewer what I planned to do, and with some advice from Professor Terry Schalk, I set out on the quest of analyzing data.

Instead of writing a program straight out of my head, I consulted professional programmers I knew, and learned of a certain magical document, the Specification. Within this, I would be able to hash out the data format, the rules, and the suggested logic. Frequently, I would consult Mr. Kliewer and confirm the logic of the yet to be written program. After a few weeks, I had a working specification and could now write the program. I had never written a specification before, and learned the use of it.

I wrote both analysis programs the weekend before ADOM's launch, and tested the ADOM program. The Muon Lifetime program, sadly, is still in beta stage due to the fact that the Muon Lifetime Experiment never happened. I wish I could've tested it more and run it by real data, but that was apparently not to be. The ADOM balloon analysis program worked well, with a few minor bugs that were fixed quickly. In fact, we discovered an interesting bug in the boards; At exactly 18 minutes, the board would detect a three fold drop in muons, unaffected by either altitude changes or location changes. Both programs are sitting on the SCIPP webserver, in two places: On the Internship 2007 website and in the 2007 Interns Stuff directory, as muon.py and balloon.py.

Working here is definitely an experience I will never forget. Despite the friction, the stress, and the panic of living as an intern at UCSC, the privilege and quest of research is far more rewarding. I learned more about real research environments, the difficulties of meshing teams with individuals from different backgrounds, the stress of making a full scale experiments succeed, and the privilege of researching under the guiding hand of UCSC-SCIPP. The internship this year has steadily worked on researching, documenting, and experimenting with the many aspects of muon scintillators and the physics of them. The true gem lies in the experience we interns have earned , and our hopes wish that each successive year will be able to build on the success of each previous year.

The Revival of the Minolta Planetarium

Better than Google Sky, the Minolta Planetarium gets the new Infinium S projector. With new features, better details, and a faster rendering engine, the Infinium S and the control mechanisms are ready for sky exploration in the twenty-first century. Given a private opportunity to "test drive" the equipment, both my sister Rebecca (see New De Anza Planetarium - Bring your binoculars) and I couldn't wait - and we weren't disappointed.

The Minolta Planetarium, located at De Anza college, was a favorite of our family for 30 years, and has finally reopened after three long years undergoing renovation. In 2004, the MS-15 used was becoming antiquated and less useful. The challenge of maintaining it was rapidly growing, much to the chagrin of De Anza. After contacting Minolta, De Anza decided to renovate the planetarium and replace the projector. The new guy is the Infinium S, and it offers many new features. The most striking lies in the rendering of the Milky Way. Instead of a static image, the Infinium draws every little dot with varying intensity to simulate the three dimensions of the sky.

We decided to attend the reopening ceremony in August, and boy, were we surprised! The event was canceled, but lucky for us, technical director, Karl von Ahnen, was wiling to show us the new Minolta planetarium. I made a bee-line for the controls, since I have always held an interest in them, and began noting the radical differences. The control office was no longer hidden away. Now, everyone could (if they turned around 180*) see the operator (isn't it nice that all the seats face one direction?). It had a couple sophisticated computer consoles, a data array, and plenty of manipulatable controls. Coupled with the main computer, the Infinium was a powerful machine.

Karl saw that I was checking out the machine and gave me different suggestions, allowing me to manipulate little things at fist (the lighting in different hues) and then trusted me to work with the bigger controls. He was glad for the oppertunity to talk to the adults face to face and still see the power of the Infinium demonstrated. For me, I loved the ability to tell the computer to simulate different sky orientations based on latitude and longitude. As I explored, Karl got to explain more and more of the Infiniums capabilities. The best was when I unexpectedly (adds spice to life) changed the sky from where we are on Earth to the distant planet of Pluto, where the sky is very different. The audience, surprised, were amazed by how different the sky was out there. I began to take a tour of the different astronomical objects, testing the skies, enjoying a foretaste of what mankind will see when they settle new worlds and build new outposts.

I also enjoyed the time scale controls and the wonderful fade-in/out abilities of the Infinium and constellations. With a palm sweep on one panel, while the sky was turning, the pictorial representations of the constellations gracefully appeared, and disappeared with another palm sweep. The azimuth, zenith overlays gave evinced human emotion better than any astro-guide or map could've. The Infinium turned the old art of searching the constellation book and looking at abstract dots into a three dimensional tour of the sky. Imagine planning out your next Messier Object Marathon, showing new comers where each of the objects are in the sky using a planetarium, and running the real contest of finding those same objects on the real sky. The possibilities are endless. I hope others will see the Minolta planetarium and appreciate the sheer possibilities and outreach it offers. Nothing is so heartening than to see what mankind might see in the future, near or distant, of the sky. It reminds all of the potential of humanity, and the simple beauty of space, the final frontier.