rplackett

LHC now at world record energy

richard@plackett.com — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 08:00:58 GMT

I just received an email from CERN's Director General informing me that we have now exceeded the energy of the Tevatron and the LHC is now officially the world's highest energy particle accelerator (i don't think we have to wait for the guys from Guinness before it becomes official in this case). It isn't clear is whether there have been collisions yet, but as its not explicitly mentioned i suspect not.

This means that there is still time for you to go and hide from black holes under the bed.

Testbeams

richard@plackett.com — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 09:40:48 GMT

So i am back running my second testbeam in as many months and have just started a 10 hour shift on a glorious saturday morning. Since those of you who have not delved into the jargon laced madness that is HEP will have little idea what im talking about i thought i would while away some of our time explaining what it is i'm doing.

I have put a matching set of photos on my flickr page here .

A testbeam is a short hand way of describing experiments being done in one of the charged particle beams provided by CERN (or any other acellerator facility). In my context as a detector physicist these have always been focussed on proving that systems that work in a lab will work in an actual charged particle beam, and produce the results you expect. For example at the moment we are measuring the aplicability of a detector for use in a 'tracking' system. We know how efficiently it can detect particles from putting a radioactive source in front of it, but we dont know how accurately six of them in a row will give us the position of a high energy particle passing through them all. (essentially because the particles from a source get stopped by the detector because they dont have enough energy to pass all the way through)

As the number of beam lines and experimental areas available is far smaller then the number of physicists who want to use them there is a rationing system in place. Users bid for time at the start of the year and are allocated anythign from a few days to a few weeks depending on their political clout and muggins turn. This leads rapidly to 24 hour operation as you never get as much time as you want and the beams are broken for approximately 25% of the time. This gives you the splendid situation of physicsts allowed to stay up all night and being forced to work at weekends etc. We are currently working 3 8 hour shifts with the daytime one subdivided so people can swap and go to meetings and other things.

So what are we doing precicely... We are measuring a Timepix chip, developed by the Medipix group at CERN. Timepix is a development taking the Medipix2 Xray imaging chip and adding some functionality to it to allow it to determine the energy or arrival time of the particles it sees. The reason we are measuring it is because there is a possibility of putting a Timepix derived chip in the particle tracking station being developed for the LHCb upgrade in 2015. We (the Medipix group) want to prove to the LHCb people that our chips are up to the job and are better than the competition. To do this we are making measurements of 3 key parameters, resolution, efficiency and timewalk.

Let me start by winding back and describing the chip. Timepix is a pixel chip, actually two chips bonded together to form a sandwich. The top layer is the 'sensor' silicon chip that consists of 256x256 55um square diode structures that produce a current when a particle passes through them. The filling of the sandwich are 65000 individual solder joints linking each pixel to a readout channel on the chip below. This 'read-out chip' is what is techncially the Timepix, this is the part developed by the group here. It has an analouge amplifier and shaper for each pixel that converts a very small, short electrical signal into a larger, longer signal more suitable for processing and measuring. This signal can then be treated in three ways (still within each 55um pixel) depending on what mode the chip is in... In the standard Medipix mode, a counter is incramented when the signal passes a threshold level. Allowing the chip to record the passage of large number of particles in situations such as a medical Xray where you want to get a high contrast image with as few particels as possible. The chip can be run in Time of Arrival (ToA) mode, where the time from the signal passing the threshold to the time the shutter closes is recorded. This is useful for ionising gas detectors where you can reconstruct the (3rd dimension) position of an ionising particle by the time the drifting charge arrives at the sensor. Finally (and from my POV most interstingly) we have the Time over Threshold mode (ToT) where the chip records the time that the amplifier signal is over its threshold, this gives a reasonably good measurement of the energy deposited in the sensor by the particle as it passes through.

This deserves a new paragraph... Traditionally the ToT information was largly ignored by tracking systems which just wanted to know whether there was a hit or not and which position it came from. As a particel passing straight through a silicon sensor deposits the same ammount of charge regardless of the energy of the particle itself (a minimum ionising particle or MIP) this seems farily reasonable... however as pixel (and strip) detectors have decreased their pixel size (or strip width) the phenomena of charge sharing has become more important, essentially a particle falling between two pixels deposits half its energy in each, by measuring the ratio of these two signals you can (very) accurately determine the position of a particle. Then by tilting the detector you can ensure that a particle will always pass through two or more pixels. Whether to include this analouge processing on the final chip, or whether to simply reduce the size of the pixel is still an open question and may be oe of the things our testbeam provides the answer to.

So back to what we are measuring.

Resolution is essentially how accurately can you reconstruct the position of a particle track through a given number of detectors at various angles to those detectors. With this measurement you can see what angle of tilt gives you the optimum resolution and what resolution a final detector system seeing a given distribution of particle angles will have. To measure this we have 6 fixed sensors and one we can rotate on a stepper motor. The six fixed chips locate a track to a good accuracy and we then redict where we should see it in the seventh.

Efficiency is the chance of seeing a track that has passed through the chip, with Timepix this number is essentially 100%, but as no one believes that we would like to be able to say what the error on that measurement is 100%+-1% is only 99%. Here again we reconstruct the tracks and look for hits in our device under test, the biggest challenge is proving that we have avoided misidentifying a hit from a second track as the one we are intereated in. This means that the error on our efficiency measurement is linked to the number of particles we see in each snapshot and to the accuracy of our tracking.

Timewalk is an effect where by a small charge signal (most probably caused by charge sharing) causes the pixels amplifier to produce a very small, slow signal, that (in an LHC detector running at 40MHz) would appear in a later clock window. Large number of these late hits would confuse the system and make reconstructing the tracks that were actually present in that tine window very difficult. In our set up (which does not use the 40MHz rate) we are using the TOA mode to track down these signals and see how bad it will be and whether anything clever has to be done to rectify it.

So thats whats going on, we have 7 detector chips mounted in a line, in a beam coming from the Super Proton Synchrotron (LHCs little brother). Because we are very civilised we are reading them out via a usb system plugged into a PC sitting next to it and reading the data via windows remote desktop and a shared 1Tb drive... I had hoped to say a little more about the sociology of several groups working together and sharing the same experimental area and so fourth but that will have to wait for another time as the technical details have gon on for far longer than i meant them to.

giga...

richard@plackett.com — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:02:21 GMT

On my daily trawl through the beeb's steadily deteriorating news pages i found the following statement i thought i would share with you nice folk in lj land...

"Greenhouse gas emissions from food production and car travel in the fatter population would be between 0.4 to 1 giga tonnes higher per 1bn people, they estimated. " (no formatting changed)

So would it not have been more informative and more instructive to the general population to have omitted the giga and the billion, re-normalised the numbers, divided by 10^9 and said 0.4 to 1 tonne per person on average. After all a ton per person still seems like a lot to me.

This seems like another example of slack reporting by the science team reprinting verbatim nonsense press releases.

Worthy of note however is the purity of the intent of the original material, rather than go for the dry science they have plumped to combine two superlative media stories, obesity and global warming. Hats off to "Dr Phil Edwards, study leader and researcher at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine" for this piece of media savvy, obviously science needs more of this type of chap. If the intentions of this merry band form the school of tropical medicine and celebrity gossip weren't clear enough the beeb end the piece with a quote..

"this is a calculation that deserves a bit more attention" ..... don't we all

linky

Leaving Imperial

richard@plackett.com — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 15:14:14 GMT

Just to Let people know today is my last day at Imperial. I will be going to work for CERN, for the MediPix collaboration for 18 months. Essentially I will be working on understanding the performance of their new radiation imaging sensor.

I will be heading to Geneva for a week on Monday for induction etc, then heading to Holland for six weeks where i will be working with a company called PANalytical, a Philips spin out. I intend to be back at weekends. Then in the middle of November I'm going to be moving to France full time.

So the end of an era, I have missed the decade at imperial by 3 days... my contract at CERN starts on the 1st and my first day at college in '98 was the 3rd (don't ask me why i remember that). I don't know what i think tbh, slightly sad at leaving the place i have stayed the longest of anywhere in my life, but also fairly excited to be doing something new.

I will have a spare room at the place in France so if people would like to invite themselves over for a long weekend they would be most welcome.

Making a wokbench

richard@plackett.com — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 13:08:15 GMT

Today i completed my long running workbench project. The idea was that i needed a very sturdy table in my shed to accommodate my grandfathers metal lathe and associated machines and also have a place to make things on. After looking at some cheap flimsy rubbish and some very expensive things i decided i had better make my own. This escalated when i decided to do it properly - partly for my own amusement and partly because i felt it was somehow inappropriate to use my inherited carpentry tools to make something a bit bodged together.

So doing it properly entails actually doing some carpentry, proper joints and not just screwing things. My experience in such things is limited but i found amongst things from my grandfathers garage a small book (minus its cover) called The Complete Amateur Woodworker". I couldn't find a date but the adverts in the back for tins of high quality stain 4d and the sketches of a man carpentering in his shirtsleeves and apron gave me the idea it had been about for a while. Having read it and learned slightly more about tenons and mortises and dovetails than CDT had managed to teach me, i decided that i was going to do my usual trick of reinventing things slightly.

So i went to my friendly neighborhood DIY superstore and found that had no wood suitable at all. Bloody Homebase. I then went to Wyckes who were slightly better. I brought £40 of sawn pine and glue (2" by 4" and some 18mm planks) and set to.

As far as a design goes a lot of it i made up as i went along and sometimes even did this intentionally so i had a way out if a certain type of procedure turned out to be beyond my very limited skill. However from now on i will write as though it was all finished design from the start, which is more or less true.

The two major features where this departed from a very standard square bench made from a stout frame and some planks were the corners where the legs attached and the way the surface was held in the frame. I decided that to minimise the change of wobbling breaking the glue etc i would have the tenons and the legs at 45 degrees to the two incoming beams from the frame. The legs would protrude through the top of the surface and the planks would be sunk flush with the frame and in turn hold the structure together with dovetails. There is also a spar across the middle providing extra support for the slightly thin planks that is itself dovetailed and holds the long sides of the frame together.

So the order of things was as follows - i cut the 2by4 for the legs and the frame to the right lengths with a hand saw. I then cut the tenons in the frame beams, again with my hand saw. I then cut the mortises right through the tops of the legs with a half inch chisel. I did a trial assembly of the legs and the frame and was pleased when it stood up on its own.I then cut the supporting spar to length and cut the dovetails in its end and used the chisel to cut dovetails in the long beams to hold it. At this point i acquired a ratchet strap to let me glue thin thing, put it round the frame and found that the spar was too long ( i had measured when it was loose). I remade the spar (thankfully the dovetails were ok) and did a trial assembly which i was pleased with, even with no glue it was quite stiff with the spar in. I then used the chisel to cut an inch wide ledge inside the frame on the long beams and dovetails on the short beams for the planks to sit in. This was a significant portion of the work as the long beams are 5 feet long. Having learned my lesson with the spar i assembled the frame again and made each plank to fit the dovetails i had cut (it turned out to be easiest to use a coping saw to cut the corresponding tails in the planks) The corner details around the tops of the legs were quite hard and difficult to describe so you had better look at the photos. When these were all done and checked and bashed into place and cursed at and sanded etc i took it all to pieces again to start glueing. This was relatively painless although quite messy. I stacked as many heavy things as i could find on top to keep the planks in place. It was left for a day and a night to dry. Then i saned the edges with an electric sander and varnished it. TADAA.

As i write the varnish is drying.

the photos of its construction are here

http://www.flickr.com/photos/richardplackett/sets/72157603207715687/

As far as tools goes i used a half inch chisel and a mallet, a hand saw, a coping saw and a ratchet strap.

From the Conference

richard@plackett.com — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 14:06:38 GMT

so i've just returned from the 10th bi-annual ICATPP conference on instrumentation in particle, astro-particle and medical physics. I delivered my talk with aplomb and only a little procrastination and have returned to report to you good people.

The conference itself was held in the lovely but crumbling Villa Olmo in Como, right on the shore of Lake Como in Italy. The villa was magnificent with painted arched ceilings and lots of marble things, although it looked just slightly unloved, like a bunch of muppets had been using it for conferences for 2o years...

Como itself felt slightly stuck in the 70's, just a little too much orange and plastic about, but was very pleasant, the food being the obvious stand out winner. "What you only want ONE main course?? you weak foreigner you!"

By and large the other talks were a mixture of interesting topics, mind numbing detail and incomprehensible accents. No i don't want to see photographs of your electronics boards.

Two however stood out form the crowd for their sheer lunacy value. Scanning the world for neutrinos with a giant boat based detector, and *listening* for ExaElectronVolt neutrinos fomr the galactic centre.

The first of these was a geophysics experiment, turns out we really don't know whats going on down there.. there are still some big gaps in our knowledge, things like "why is the centre of the earth hot?", and "whats it made from?" are still being debated. One theory is the world is partially heated by a sort of slow burning nuclear reaction of naturally occurring uranium deposits. This reaction will of course give off neutrinos that are able to escape and we can detect. Step up our old favorite the liquid Cherenkov detector. This time a large tank full of clear oil (with a nice high molecular mass for those pesky particles to interact with) surrounded by single photon sensitive photo tubes, much like the mighty Super-K. Ok all well and good, except we cant distinguish what coming form underground and whats coming from space...bugger. No wait, if we move the big tub-o-oil and see a local change that cancels out the background doesn't it, ok so we need a way of shifting this about... A BOAT! So the diagrams show a purpose built barge, but i suspect they secretly want a decommissioned oil taker for bragging rights. The image of a bunch of physicists sailing about the high sees with a tanker of baby oil telling passing fishermen they are scanning the centre of the earth is one i really will savour. That and its a really neat bit of science, since they could correlate any structure they see to the tectonic plates and really start to get some answerers.

Ok good as that was its not even close in my mind to listening for neutrinos... thats right same dudes, neutrinos the most non interacting particle that we have actually seen, weighting almost exactly noting this group expects to be able to listen for them. And lets be clear this isn't listening as in measuring cosmic pressure waves this is terrestrial listening with microphones.. Sounds mental but actually not so much, turns out that the most high energy neutrinos (ones that happen only once in a blue moon) that pass through the earth with approximately an ExaElectronVolt, or one with the energy of an electron accelerated in a field of 10^18 volts each contain about a joules worth of energy... thats a hell of a lot for a subatomic particle. And when one of these chapies actually bothers to interact it produces a pretty big hadronic shower, depositing all that energy in a fairly small region. Now suppose we assume that one of these guys hits the sea and somewhere underwater interacts with an unlucky molecule pf H2O, smashing both of them to pieces and spraying a pile of subatomic debris along its trajectory, you get a cylinder of energy deposition in the water about 1cm round and ~10m long, now in that volume of water a joule isn't very much, but a joule delivered instantaneously at the speed of light produces a noticeable noise (pressure wave) form the expansion of that column of water in the otherwise incompressible sea. Not only that its a very short pulse that you can use Fourier analysis techniques to pull out of all the other noises. So now all we need is an array of seabed microphones calibrated to detect the quietest of quiet noises, shame the ideas so crack-fueled, well never get the cash to build that lot right... Step up cold war paranoia, turns out the good old US navy and HMRN have just the things you want. So these guys presented their preliminary results of using the submarine sonar nets to listen for the lightest least interacting subatomic particles from the centre of the galaxy. The highlight of which was when he pointed to an uncorrelated noise peak and said "we don't know whats causing this noise, we hope its not some sort of fish."

BBQ Chicken Satay

richard@plackett.com — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 21:00:29 GMT

After a request here goes my recipe for an Indonesian style chicken satay. This is not an authentic recipe, i am not Indonesian, and only lived there before the age of two. It was picked up by my family and repeated so often it became a regular feature of my childhood.. heres how a reasonable facsimile of that experience can be achieved in the uk.

Ingredients
chicken (breast)
satay sticks (things Brits tend to call wooden kebab sticks)
a bbq (nice and hot, charcoal for preference as gas is cheating)
an onion
some garlic
a pot of crunchy peanut butter
a pot of sambal olek (available in most supermarkets) hot chopped chili in oil (iirc made by conimex)
a pot of ketjup manis (ditto) a sweet soy sauce (ditto)
a packet of coconut cream
a few limes
some oil (olive or otherwise)

There are two parts (beyond the actual cooking) the marinade and the peanut sauce.

You need to marinate the chicken, preferably overnight so do this the day before your barbeque.

Ok first cut the chicken into inch cubes (and trim off any gristly bits) and put 4 or five pieces onto each stick Four breast pieces make about 15 satays and everyone really wants three or four to eat if thats all you're doing. Then chop (quite finely) and fry the onion and crush and add a couple or three cloves of garlic. Stop when the onions begin to go clear (dont worry about a few crispy bits). Put 1/4 of the onion+garlic into a jug and pour the whole packet of coconut cream in. Mix in about 1/3 of a bottle of the soy sauce. It should now be a light brown colour with and have the consistency of single cream, if its too thick add some water, if its thinner, dont worry. Pour it over the satays.

As the peanut sauce gets tastier as it ages do this the day before if you can. Take the rest of our onion+garlic and bung it and some more oil into a saucepan. get them hot and sizzling again and add ~1/3 of a jar of sambal. Once this has cooked for about a minute add and stir the whole jar of peanut butter, it should melt and pick up the onion. You now add between 1/3 to the rest of the pot of ketjup manis and the juice of 1-3 limes to taste. This is the difficult bit as you really need to know what it should taste like... It should also be hot to taste so add some more sambal if it needs it, the peanut butter will soak up a lot of the heat. Some pointers, it should taste rich and salty, but not be cloying like peanut butter, it should be bitter but if you can taste lime above the other flavours you've gone too far and need to add more sweet soy to try and rescue it. If its too thick to bubble gently on a low heat add more oil till its just thin enough and let it blip for a quarter of an hour. Its consistency should be just thinner than peanut butter and slightly thicker than most dips. Leave the sauce to brew in the fridge for a while and get it out a bit before you start the barbeque.

Barbeque the satays, turning regularly and adding the marinade to the top. They are done when you can feel the satay start to bounce, as the chicken is now firm all the way through to the stick. Take the1m off as soon as this happens to keep them tender. Eat them with the sauce and some fried rice if you have it.

First National Electrical

richard@plackett.com — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 16:51:44 GMT

Ok heres a quick warning to everyone out there searching for First National Electrical (aka 1st National Electrical) especially the Buckinghamshire branch of this useless company. Don't use them. This is my internet revenge for the day off work i squandered waiting for their electrician to turn up. Well at 4pm i phoned them to make sure everything was ok. Turns out it wasn't. He couldn't come today after all. He might be able to come tomorrow, but unfortunately I've just used up what little goodwill was left at work by taking today off so i cant do that.

What really bugs me is that they knew from about lunchtime he wouldn't be able to make it and also knew i had taken the day off, but still failed to phone me so i could do something with my day. So if anyone reads this and decides not to use this bunch of muppets i would be very happy.

I am now officially fed up with tradesmen and delivery companies who insist that you take a day off work for them to do their job and then fail to do theirs. So please add comments with any companies you would rather people at large didn't use as punishment for their disregard for their customers time.

Remember thats First National Electrical or 1st National (google this means you), they also do plumbing and drain clearing, and i suspect are equally unable to show up to do either of them.

Pointless Post

richard@plackett.com — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 15:58:39 GMT

Todays post (the first for a long while) is brought to you by a free half hour before going for a budvar in Resteraunt 1. It concerns the unimaginative topic of today.

Today began on a slightly sour note with me oversleeping for about the millionth time and not meeting Dave and Bill for breakfast at CERN and so failing to hand over a chunk of metal i had muled out for them in my luggage. This part is a jig that will tell us whether a much larger part will actually fit inside the RICH iron shielding.

Anyway i was in CERN just before 9 and met up with Andrew Main, a slightly mad bowled playing Scots technitian who woks for Edinburg. The two of us are finishing of the last 6 production HPD columns. All the electronics and HPDs have been mounted on all 14 of these structures but things like the cooling plates need to be added and some final checks made.

The columns themselves are black annodised aluminium frames about 1.5m by 0.4m, one long side is armed with our shiny Hybrid PhotoDiodes (single photon sensitive imaging light detectors) and the frame itself is populated with the electronics to drive these beasts. Fully mounted it weighs about 40kg, with its cooling plate on 50kg.

We got the first column out of its reconstituted air (helium free) storage, slid it on its temporary rails into its transport frame and moved it to the pc with the ELMB boards attatched. They are used to erad out the temperatre sensors on the low voltage regulators, the only components that get really hot. The pt100 sensors have been mounted on the boards with the regulator chips and are squashed under the regulators heatsinks. In some cases too hard, hence we test them to see which are working. Today only 1 has failed (a victory for RICH1 as RICH2 has had a much higher pt100 failture rate.

We then draged the frame through to the other lab with the big table and layed it flat and connected it to the power fupplies and data aquisition pc. I powerd on the column whilst Andrew got on with some electronics for another part of the project. This took a little while as i had forgottoen to copy across the correct config files(these set voltage levels and account for slight variations in the chips manufacture), once i had done that it passed its JTAG checks (a low level io check) and was happily drawing ~16A. Then i tried to set up the DAQ system...

This took the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon as it had been completely powerd down and some of the wires moved around by enthusiastic students. The main problems was i didnt know how to set up the pulse generators for the faked timing signal. After a RTFM moment i got it working and we checked thatthe column worked before we put the plate over the electronics.

Liver for lunch at R1 whihc was a bit stringy, i left some of it :(.

We then put the plate over the electronics, attatching the small heatsinks to it with a thermally condctive plactacine called thermagon. We screwed the 30 low profiel screws gently pusing the plate onto the thermagon and makigna good connection with the spikes of the heatsinks.

We then tested the DAQ again and found to our enormous relief that we had failed to break anyhthing, yomped the column and plate to the other lab, tested the temperature semsnors, no more of which had shuffeld off this mortal coil and heaved the whole thing back into the storage cupboard. Gas on lab locked and off for tea at 4:15.

I had hoped to do two columns but the pratting with the systems took most of my time.

We decided at tea to meet up again at 6pm (3mins away now) for a beer prior to a steak at the L'aviation steak resteraunrt.

No time for spell checking im afraid. Off for soem beer

online word processing in LaTeX?

richard@plackett.com — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 11:26:09 GMT

amongst the mirriad of other things work is asking me to to all at once is to write a 2 page summary document at fairly short notice.

The trouble is that im continually bouncing between 4 or 5 pcs depending on who is in the Imperial office at CERN, whether im in the lab, whether im using the laptop in the flat etc etc. atm ive resorted to writign the damn thing in word and saving it to my webspace... this is obviously not ideal.

So im starting to re-ponder my thoughts for using a wiki as a web based word processor that you type LaTeX code into and it generates nice pdf's when you ask it to, saving everything online, a history etc etc.

Atm im still too busy to do anything much towards this, but i know a bunch of you chaps are into your wikis in a big way so what is the best way to go about this sort of thing? Which wiki? Some appear to support LaTeX code? Am i talking about google word processor?

Anyone have any thoughts?

Credit cards

richard@plackett.com — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 09:23:20 GMT

It has come to my attention that i will be spending some of the research groups money on flights and things via my credit card over the next little while. To make the most of this i am considering getting a slightly shinier one than i currently posses. One that gives me rewards for spending other peoples money seems like a good plan.

The question is what one should i go for, does anyone have any suggestions

I have head of ones that give you cash back at Waitrose, and access to the club class lounge at major airports and things like that.

Any thoughts mighty live journal masses? what are the best rewards to go for, what is on offer, what do you use?

phd'd

richard@plackett.com — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 12:21:18 GMT

hmm well i passed my viva yesterday, which was nice.

It went better then expected, which is god ecause i expected to go badly. It didn't, my examiners were easygoing and generous. They also didn't concentrate too hard on the background particle physics which i was very concerned about, as i felt i really didnt know as much as i should. Once we got past that with only afew sticky moments things were relativly plain sailing as we moved onto the bits of work i had actually performed. There were one or two tricky moments involving time progression of charge through silicon and the signal to noise ratio of an HPD but they didnt seem too upset that i didnt know the answers.

Im sorry i didnt organise anything oficial for afterwards but i really wasnt inany mood to tempt fate before the damn thing, im also sorry ive been such a miserable bugger in the last couple of weeks. (que cries of we didnt notice and how can we tell the difference)

I now have a few corrections to do, although no major reanalysis thankfully and then reprint, bind and submit for full doctorage.

The end is in sight

richard@plackett.com — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 11:09:33 GMT

So today at ~11:59 i finished faffing with the references of the second draft of my thesis, compiled the LaTeX and sent it to my supervisor for his final readthrough...

Although im expecting quite a lot of alterations back from him, this feels like a minor milestone so i thought id imortalise it.

After that im going to give it one more readthrough and then to the binders we go...

atm it weighs in at 182 pages with 82 references

Writing to my MP

richard@plackett.com — Tue, 09 May 2006 16:20:55 GMT

ok on the advice of pro-test.org.uk im writing to my MP to express my dissatisfaction a the inflametory language used in this early day motion http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx?EDMID=28280.

"That this House, in common with Europeans for Medical Progress, expresses its concerns regarding the safeguarding of public health through data obtained from laboratory animals, particularly in light of large numbers of serious and fatal adverse drug reactions that were not predicted by animal studies; is concerned that the Government has not commissioned or evaluated any formal research on the efficacy of animal experiments, and has no plans to do so; and, in common with 83 per cent. of general practitioners in a recent survey, calls upon the Government to facilitate an independent and transparent scientific evaluation of the use of animals as surrogate humans in drug safety testing and medical research."

from pro-test.org.uk
"
Main rebuttal points are that:
Europeans for Medical Progress have already had 5 complaints upheld against them by the Advertising Standards Authority.
The claim that there has been no formal enquiry is incorrect, there have been 3 in the last 4 years:
House of Lords Select Committee on animals in scientific procedures (2002)
Animal Procedures Committee Report on the review of cost-benefit assessment in the use of animals in research (2003)
Nuffield Council on Bioethics - Ethics of Research Involving Animals (2005)

The 83% of GPs stat in the EDM is misleading. 83% of GPs said they believed animal research COULD be misleading. In the same way, probably 100% of politicians believe democratic governments COULD make mistakes, this is not an argument against democratic governments.
The research company which carried out the survey (TNS Healthcare) said "the conclusions drawn from this research are wholly unsupported by TNS...The data does not support the interpretation made by the client [Europeans for Medical Progress]”.
"

The internet seems to support these assesments so the quaestion is as somone who supports animal testing should i send my letter or not. Are they reasonable objections?

I personally think i would be happier to see something that said 'there is some public controversy as to the effectivness of animal testing some research should be done to resolve the matter'

Obviously i dont just want to parrot a pressure group unless i have some measure of confindence they arnt talking bollocks. What do people think is a sensible course of action?

Beer the twelth

richard@plackett.com — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 20:24:37 GMT

well we brewed so its time for another incomprehensible and interminable post on the subject.

This beer is to be a best/pride type and contained

4kg pale malt
150g crushed crystal malt
30g crushed chocolate malt
100g fuggles hops for an hour bittering
50g fuggles for for 10mins hopping
200g of light brown sugar

we created a new torroidal imersion heat exchanger that stretches the height of the copper (urn) so we can allow the precipitate fomr the hot and cold breaks to settle out. I manged to sieve a lot of it off during the boil, which is fun.

The sparging seemed to go well taking only an hour to bring us up to 20 litres (just over 4 gallons)

The hydrometer read ~1040, but then we knocked it over and forgot to take any more samples

The taste was good (for this stage) and this new system seems to produce very clear beer so fingers crossed

We remembered the moss this time.

In other news to excite fans of the barnes brewing collective we decanted the eleventh beer into its cask on wednesday and it was as clear as a bell. Totelly bright and not a hint of haze, straigh out of the fermenter. We tastred it today and whilst it was very bitter, since its so young, and we used golding hops If left for a couple of three weeks then i cant see any reason why it wont be a spectaularly nice summer ale. Another 40 pints to drink, woe! woe is us.

Actually i think woe may be the correct interperatation, during the interminable write up i seem to have lot all ability to drink beer and not feel a) extrordinarily pissed after about a half and b) horribly hungover the next day.

Beer XI

richard@plackett.com — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 19:55:13 GMT

o so we are now onto our eleventh beer, and as the weather is no longer freezing and the long lead time we though it should be summary. Ive forgotten the name of the recipe but it contained:

4kg pale malt (3kg crushed pale malt 1kg larger malt)
NO darker malts, not even crystal
a bag~100g of golding hops
500g of unrefined cane sugar to boost up the strength

We used the new mash tun and sparging method, and although it didnt run bringt from the tun it did go very clear at the hot break, with lots of big lumps forming that could be caught in a sieve.

We had to mix it abour somehwta with the heatexchanger that made it go a bit cloudy agian, wihc was a shame.

We then ran it into the fermenter making sure it was thoroughly aerated.

We forgot to boil the moss (AGAIN - sodding hell thats like the tenth time!) and had to put it in as a tea afterwards on top of the yeast.

We used the french yeast in the blue packets cos there wasnt any of the other non-muntons variety in the shop.

Generally went ok - we need to build a better heat exchanger and get another barrel.

Beer number ten seems to be doing superbly, truly clear, although still a little bitter at the moment. have to restrain jim from drinking it all before i can have some.

Barnes Brew 10 the syphoning

richard@plackett.com — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 17:28:36 GMT

ok I missed the brewing of this batch due to an attack of the dreaded thesis

It used the mash tun, a different recipy, cooled in the bolier for the hot and cold bread and was generally a very different method based on the book Mr A lent us.

So it came out with a really really good fruity smell, bitter flavour, light summary colour and a totally different fermentation action.

Previously we have had a large amount of lumpy sludge at the bottom ~2 inches, this time we had a thin layer of slimy sludge at the bottom and lumpy floaty bits left on the top after a vigerous fermentation.

Tasted pretty good, cant wait to see how it turns out

We syphoned it into the cask without any priming this time as it still seemed to be fermenting well

Andys Report of the brewing follows ***

We looked through the beer recipies and found one that we had most of the ingredients for. We didn't have enough malt, so we put in extra crystal and sugar. we wanted to do something that wasn't too dark so that we could see if it was clear, and also since it is almost summer. therefore the recipie was:

3kg of Larger malt
300g of crystal
85g bitter hops
20g aroma hops
500g demerera sugar

We seemed to have larger malt that should have gone off on the 14 of jan. this might not be ideal.
we mashed at 65C, topping up with boiling water half way through, for 90min.
we found that the flow through the grist was very slow when we tried to run off, and it wasn't running clear after some time (we added the turbid running back into the tun, so that they could be filtered again). We decided it was taking too long, and we should speed it up, so we disturbed the grist a little, and got on with the sparging. It would help if we had a smaller mesh that the deep fat frier as this has a large volume. We then sparged at 77-80C as reccomended, and this raised the grist back to about 68C. The grist seemed to allow quite a lot of shit through, but at the same time, quite a lot of scummy stuff was evident on the top of the grist. We sparged until we didn't seem to be getting much more out. We then made it up to volume and the gravity came out at about 1024. we boiled the heat exchanger in the urn and boiling water came out of it into the sink. we did the bittering for 45 min (the book said 90), and the aroma for 15, with the irish moss. We then turned off the element, and turned on the heat exchanger (still leaking) and it cooled quite quickly to 25C. We left it to settle with the boiler off and didn't pour and of the trub (shit on the bottom of the urn) into the fermenter. We decided to try deliberate aeration, and poured it out cold, with the maximum dribbling, and from a good height. This produced a foamy head, which dissapeared by this morning, but the lid was already bowing. There was almost no sediment in the bottom of the fermenter. by this afternoon then lid ws still repressurising, and a layer of yeast about 10mm thick, resembling dough has formed on the top. This has not happened before. Fuck knows what will happen next.

The tun was good at maintaining the temperature, although we added the malt at 72 to get to 64-65 so it might have been better a little hotter ~ 75. Its a bit small, but this is partly because the frier takes up too much space. There is also a problem getting it to run clear, but we are filtering some of it. The hot and cold break happening in the boiler is a good idea, as the heat exchanger is sterile, and the trub from the cold break stays in the kettle.

engaged

richard@plackett.com — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 16:46:41 GMT

just to let people know, Claire and I have got engaged.

Beer - no.& and no.8 looking positive

richard@plackett.com — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 20:28:22 GMT

this evening we syphoned the 8th barnes brew into its bareall and a few bottles (inclusding a clear one to keep an eye on things)

tasting it at this stage no.8 was really good - tbe best balance of flavours weve had yet

no.7 (to be drunk on thursday) was ever so slightly hazy (this is the first non opaque sucess weve had with the new clearing method) but tasted good if a little bitter. Aparently we have to expect homebrew to be sligty cloudy, although given how clear our first attempts were im a little disapointed, although i do much prefer the taste of the later ones which is whats important.

No. 8 is now ready to be taken to Mr. Audens establishment for the pie off, although as the yield is up i doubt he wants to carry 5 gallons home on the train on thursday evening.

Now the planning for number 9 - to enhance the clearing we may try and do the second phase in two stages - bung a splash of irish moss into it a day or so before we decant iut into the cask. THe heat excanger needs to be leak proofed, and we need to try and repeatt our very sucessful mahsing.

mmmmm beer

Beer

richard@plackett.com — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 10:13:11 GMT

Well once agin we brewed. Atempting to rereate the one that failed to work.

Brewing on aschoolnight has previously led to dissaster and being up till 2am, but due to an increase in the efficiency of our mahing we managed to be finisheed by 10pm, despite being exhausted.

this batch will hopefully be for the pie-off,

notable things we used only half a bag of hops, as opposed to a whole bag a normal to try and get the bitterness under controll.

100g crystal malt
50g crushed chocolate malt
30g uncrushed chocolate malt
30-50g (cant remember) of crushed roast barly
~ spoonful of crushed dark malt
400g of dark muscavado sugar

1/4 bag fuggles for 15 mins (bittering) then added 1/4 bag (hopping) for 10 mins with bittering left in

cooling system seemed to work well but may have laked slughtly on removal

Tasted beer in progress after a week of second fermentation - was cloudy but seemd to be heading in very much the right direction - will be a good one to have people round to drink

CCD's

richard@plackett.com — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 16:06:19 GMT

anyone know if there is a readily available of visable (or near visable) light range CCD that is reasonably radiation tollerant. Or indeed has any information on the radiation tollereance of CCDs

Richard

7 things that annoy me meme

richard@plackett.com — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 13:03:31 GMT

ok so i was tagged by billy ...

but i decline to be churlish enough to claim that having just been offered a job (and relieveing the associated anxiety) there is anyhting causng me any noticable annoyance except the hangover brought on by a bottle of bubbly, a very tasty curry (lamb malaya, special fried rice, a gralic naan and tempura veg) and some drinkable white plonk.

things look shiny, if a bit hazy.

so here are 7 things i think (at this precise moment) are cool instead.

1) the lego difference engine on slahsdot
2) my LaTeX set up that automagically compiles my thesis together
3) Steam Engines
4) drums
5) hovercraft
6) rapid prototyping machiens that work in metal (they WILL change the world)
7) my CERN branded swiss army knife

no one is taged - you are all free to do as you please ;]

Job Offer

richard@plackett.com — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 17:18:56 GMT

Ive just been told ive got the LHCb RA job as long as i sumit my thesis before the 1st of June.

woo

R

Beer

richard@plackett.com — Sat, 04 Feb 2006 16:24:47 GMT

the previous beer seems to have become infected, rendering null and void our invitation to copme and drink it.

Today we started a new batch

we used
70g chocolate malt
150g of crystal malt
3kg of pale malt

150g of sugar (a mix of dark muscavado and castor)
100g of honey (mmmm)

fuggles hops 1/3rd of a bag for 30mins for bittering, then left in with the other 2/3 for 15mins for hopping

To aviod infection it was boiled (whihc may lose some of the hoppy flavour)

Mashing and sparging seemed towork particualrly well this time - lifting the bag when sparging helps enormously

Beer all round

richard@plackett.com — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 15:57:49 GMT

The barnes homebrew collective is pleased to announce an open sampling/comiseration at the failure of the latest batch (hopefullt a best'y, pride'y sort of mid beer) on thursday the 9th at Andys flat. whihc is 133A church road barnes (over chestertons) and can be reached from barnes stations and by the 209 from hammersmith.

If its all gone wrong then we shall adjourn to the red lion as is traditional.

EDIT - Looks like it may be moved to a week later to avoid clashing with the Batterea festival

Richard