now picnic

I was reading an article today in Nature about fusion and it reminded me of working at SRI (Stanford Research Institute) many summers ago.

There was another summer student there who was working in a cold fusion lab, who would occassionally sit outside, have lunch, and get attacked by wasps with a big group of us summer students. (There were a lot of wasps, but they mostly just wanted our syrupy sodas and could often be distracted with them.)

Anyway, this guy worked in a different part of the lab than the rest of us (mysterious!) and he was older (cool!) had a thick scottish accent (sexy!) and he was working on cold fusion (sounds awesome!). So, when we asked him, with some amount of envy, what is was like over in his lab, I was surprised to hear that he was pretty bored. He said there wasn't actually a lot to do over there, and mostly they all just sat around and looked for (but didn't find) any evidence of cold fusion. He said he drank a lot of coffee, and smoked a lot of cigarettes, and went home every day thinking "another day.... no cold fusion."

The thing going on in today's article is apparently sonoluminescence and not cold fusion, but they are both types of table-top nuclear fusion, so I say "close enough."

(Oh! And! The photo. It's the first one I took with my digital camera when I got it. It's my scarf. Or fusing atoms. One or the other.)