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If anyone wants to study for it, be sure to invite me. I’ll probably improve more by helping other people than by doing anything by myself.

Does anyone know where the test is going to take place? It said FAMU, but I have no idea which building. I assume it means the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering campus rather than the main FAMU camus?

      DO 1150 i = 1, ncomp
          rcode = 0
          jcode = 0
          jj = 1
          jmax = m(i,1)
          IF (jmax .EQ. 0) GOTO 1130
 1090     DO 1100 j = jj, jmax
              ethrsh=et(i,j)
              CALL rate(kinel,ksuper,ethrsh,i,j,rcode,jcode)
              IF (j.GT.(m(i,1)+m(i,2))) ksuper(i,j)=0.
 1100     CONTINUE
          IF ((rcode + jcode) - 1) 1120,1110,1140
 1110     IF (jcode) 1130,1130,1120
 1120     rcode = 1
          GOTO 1090
 1130     CONTINUE
          jcode = 1
          jj = m(i,1) + 1
          jmax = m(i,1) + m(i,3)
          rcode = 0
          GOTO 1090
 1140     CONTINUE
 1150 CONTINUE

It’s like a freaking maze. Gotta love those “arithmetic IF” statements. If the value of the expression is negative, it branches to the first label, zero to the second, and positive to the third. I mean, that’s way more clear than, for example “if ((rcode .eq. 0) .and. (jcode .eq. 0))”, right? *facepalm*

This is after I had to change all the tab characters into the correct number of spaces just so it would compile. Did I mention FORTRAN 77 places great meaning on certain columns of the source code? That’s right, if you type one space character at the beginning of a line, it can break your entire program.

MORE LAMENESS

Consider the following code:

      OPEN(7,FILE='dis_property_flue.dat')
	WRITE(7,9056) ebyn*2.45e19, vdrift, ...

This perfectly valid code opens a file named “dis_property_flue.dat” and starts writing stuff to it (never mind why anyone would choose that name). 7 is an arbitrary number that serves as a handle to the opened file. Now consider this:

      OPEN(6,FILE='dis_property_flue.dat')
	WRITE(6,9056) ebyn*2.45e19, vdrift, ...

Looks pretty similar, but this one MAKES ALL OUTPUT STATEMENTS STOP WORKING. This is because 6 is a special “magic” unit number that is pre-connected to the screen output. If you use it to open a normal file, the magic goes away and none of your print statements after that will print anything. This was actually in this code I have to deal with, and it took me the longest time to figure out what was going on.

what is going on is that we are moving the 7th fleet out of Okinawa and into Guam in 4 years and this is a BIG PROJECT….  it includes a lot of special systems that there will need to be physicist doing.    Also there is a little mix of danger during the pull out of Okinawa since we account for 55%+ of the islands income.  Most likely there will be a bunch of suicide.

I spent the better part of a week making Boltzmann plots of helium plasmas. A Boltzmann plot is where you look at a bunch of spectral lines of some species (in this case helium atoms), use that to calculate the populations of the states, and then plot those populations versus the energies of the states, to see if they follow Boltzmann’s law, and if they do, to calculate the temperature. (The populations should be proportional to exp(-E/kT), where T is the “excitation temperature”.)

So I did all this stuff, like putting a different monochromator in the spectrometer and recalibrating it, taking a bunch of spectra, then looking up the lines in the NIST database. I found 10 usable helium lines, which I thought was pretty good, and then looked up all this stuff like Einstein coefficients and degeneracies, yadda yadda yadda, so I could make a Boltzmann plot. I was so happy because they immediately made a pretty good straight line as they’re supposed to, so I did a linear fit and concluded that the excitation temperature was about 0.75 eV. (In increasing order of disdain, that’s 8700 K for you non-plasma people, 8400° C for you non-physics people, or 15,000° Fahrenheit for you backwards people I’m embarrassed to know.)

Then I estimated the electron temperature by a different method, and got about 6 eV (70,000 K). This did not make me happy, because the electron temperature and and excitation temperature are supposed to be pretty close. I spent a while pondering this and searching for things I did wrong.

Then I saw this paper: The excitation temperature in (helium) plasmas. It clearly (patiently? exasperatedly?) explains how laboratory-scale helium plasmas are invariably far from thermal equilibrium, so the populations of the states do not follow a single Boltzmann distribution, and if you try to measure the excitation temperature you’ll get something that seems reasonable, but in fact is “hardly related to any plasma quantity”. In other words making a Boltzmann plot is practically USELESS and a WASTE OF TIME. They even quote a bunch of reported excitation temperatures and say “Look, we can predict these solely based on what lines they chose to measure, and not based on anything about the plasma at all. They’re MEANINGLESS.”

Anyway, I’m glad I found this paper before I invested more time in this, or even presented it in my paper or at the APS meeting. Now to work on something that can actually tell us stuff about the plasma…

I got myself stuck in Japan. I was trying to stay stateside, but that didn’t happen.

I am doing Financial Risk Analysis for DJM construction’s Japanese subsidiary!!! Its pretty cool, I was suppose to do Insurance analysis on medication research project,s but there was a buy out and that change. Right now I am traveling around Japan between construction sites and doing the Financial controls, Pay is awesome, and its like I am on a full time Vacation. It similar to what I was doing for work in Tallahassee.

The Japanese Managers at the sites are cool and Kiss Butt when you show up, and you always get something special sent to your hotel room that night. I have been trying to figure out how they are paying for it too. I think they are using the petty cash funds, but I can’t prove it.I have actually started to stay at the “Love Hotels”. They are cheaper or about the same cost per day then the normal business hotels and WAY much nicer, and you get clean sheets at anytime on demand.

Saya loves it since she gets a giant bed to herself.  Saya is this 22 year old Japanese woman this is my Assistant/Translator. I actually found her at the McDonalds near my apartment.  I was doing interviews for assistants and went out for lunch and she was the clerk there. Her English was the best I have seen from a Non-English speaker, but she had only a HS education and it took an argument with my boss to be able to hire her.   She’s Pretty cool, but she screams every time a dog barks. She actually lives in my 2nd bedroom which seems more like a closet then a room, but she loves it. I actually offered her my room, but she said NO. I do need her around almost at all hours; since anything can come in. She is from Fukui and I have been having her make our travel plans up so we at least stop there once a week or more so she can visit her family and I like it too. I think her mother thinks we are dating and or going to get married or something… She has been buy bridal magazines for the last 2 weeks and show me them and pointing at Saya, its been a little weird to say the least and that she has only been my employee for like 50days and I think Hitomi is pissing off Saya too.  Her father Yoshi, is just happy that she has a good job and he likes the fact that she doesn’t need money anymore. Yoshi makes a good drinking buddy too, don’t quite know what he is saying but its fun.    Liqueur is part of my travel budget too, I can go for top shelf!!!!!!!!

We were to be in Iwata region, but that has all been thrown off course by the earthquake and the tremors have been fairly bad.  Right now its 06:00am we are in Sapporo waiting to catch a 07:30 flight down to Kanazawa and then go the city of Nanoa, we have some project going on due to the earthquake there from last year and  they are way behind schedule. I am going to try and just drive down to Fukui… projects that are in this situation usually means I will can get up to 2-3 extra speciel special visits, and I just want to deal with it tonight.  You can’t turn these down either, or its like a big bad thing and can and a total dishonnorment, and can even cause the project managers to think they are going to be fired, and all kinds of crazy stuff…

I learned how to use a squat toilet!!! I think I can add as a skill into my resume. I actual kind of slipped into one about 3 weeks ago near Kanazawa. It inspired me to buy new shoes and some socks, that was gross.

Hey… In 4 weeks I am going to update with photos from the Komatsu heavy equipment plant.  We are buying 5 large earth movers and I am really just taking a visit for fun (I can do most of this over the phone).   These are those earth movers that are big enough to drive into with 5-10 trucks into the bucket. This should be cool, and they said I could drive one (Its not a big deal they go like 3mph).    They are going to our PT DH coal mine in Indonesia for the B and C pits.

Shane

PS:  7-11 rules the earth!!!! or atleast Japan…. Damn they are everywhere

Simulations of 12 C Break Up In A Twin Ionization
Chamber1 C.B. SEGAL, Florida State University, N.R. PATEL, U.
GREIFE, Colorado School of Mines, K.E. REHM, C.M. DEIBEL, J.
GREENE, D. HENDERSON, C.L. JIANG, B.P. KAY, H.Y. LEE, R.
PARDO, M. NOTANI, Argonne National Laboratory, S.T. MARLEY,
Western Michigan University, X.D. TANG, University of Notre Dame
— In stellar explosions the triple α decay process is key to forming the
life-giving 12 C . This experiment is to further investigate the energy re-
gion in 12 C around 10 MeV where a theoretically predicted 2+ state has
yet to be observed. The motivation for studying this is to better un-
derstand the 12 C nucleosynthesis process that occurs in red giant stars
where the short lived 8 Be interacts with alphas at extreme tempera-
ture and pressure scenarios which then in turn creates 12 C. We study
the particle-unbound states by implanting 12 B into a twin Frisch grid
ionization chamber and following the decay into 12 C and subsequently
into three α particles. The response of this ionization chamber to the
detection of multiple α particles was studied using various simulation
programs. Results of these simulations and limits for the predicted 2+
state will be presented.
1 This  work is supported by the U.S. DOE, ONP, under contract DE-
AC02-06CH11357 (ANL) and DE-FG02-04ER41320 (WMU). Authors
from the Notre Dame acknowledge support from the NSF under grant
PHY01-40324, and the JINA, NSF-PFC under grant PHY02-16783.

Looking forward to both that conference AND the SPS national convention in November? any feedback on this? also need fall tshirt ideas for moneyyyyyyyyyyy!

So I finally set in stone the scope of my project, because I submitted this abstract for the APS Division of Plasma Physics meeting in November:

Temperature estimation from molecular nitrogen UV spectra in atmospheric pressure plasmas KEENAN PEPPER, Florida State University, YONGHO KIM, Los Alamos National Laboratory, JIHUN KIM, Seoul National University — Atmospheric pressure plasmas have many potential applications to fuel processing, surface treatment, and manipulation of chemical reactions. These plasmas are often non-thermal, which means different species are not in equilibrium and have different effective temperatures. This is critical for many applications because it allows high concentrations of reactive species to be produced without using a prohibitive amount of power. In the present work, numerical software was developed to estimate the vibrational and rotational temperatures (T_vib and T_rot) of N₂ molecules from their ultraviolet emission spectra. The electron temperature T_e can also be estimated by comparing the N₂ spectrum to that of the N₂⁺ molecular ion. This technique is applied to several plasma sources including audio frequency, RF, and microwave devices. The results are presented and their implications for practical applications are discussed.

That last sentence is some vague BS because I knew I’d better do something useful with the spectral analysis method, but had no idea what.

My software for estimating the rotational and vibrational temperatures already works great. Props to my dogs Jørgen and Erhard, without whom it would not have been possible, and also to Jihun Kim, whom I’ve never met, but who originally wrote about half of the existing code, and I must say I’ve seen much worse (although there were some WTFs in there).

Right now I’m working on getting the awful piece of software ELENDIF to do useful things. And it really is awful; it’s full of WTFs. You press the X button that closes every other Windows program, and nothing happens. To close it, you have to click on something that looks like a menu, but is really just a button. More seriously, whenever I try to include electron energies higher than 150 eV in the calculation, it dies with a Fortran array-out-of-bounds error. I don’t see any way to work around this without the source code.

In personal life, I’ve been hiking a lot on the weekends (should post some photos soon), and reading The Uplift War, which is getting close to having some human-alien sex in it, and I really hope it does. I sent my girlfriend Hannah a box of goodies and can’t wait to see her in three weeks. I need to find some gifts for my sister and mother too, because they both had birthdays while I was here.

Now what about EVERYONE ELSE WHO SHOULD BE POSTING HERE???