Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Here I am at LLNL finally. I just got back from a talk which had nothing to do with the reason I am here, adaptive optics, and I am ashamed to say I fell asleep during it. Luckily I didn’t snore!
The atmosphere here is really relaxed; everyone calls everyone else by their first names, no “Drs.” around. And the lab is situated on a block that is a mile square, and it’s basically a small town: it has its own zip code (or is it area code), fire station, hospital, police system, gas station, stores, etc. That seems to be a theme here in Calif.; Mt. Hamil, where Lick Observatory is located, is also its own little town. The difference is, at Mt. Hamil there are only 50 townspeople, but here at LLNL, there are over 10,000 employees.
There are also orange bikes by each entrance, and scattered throughout the grounds, which you can use as you like. They are the old-fashioned kind that you brake by pedaling backwards, and have a basket in the front. Takes a little getting used to, but they are cool.
The whole place is cool! I haven’t chosen a project yet, because we haven’t spoken to all the groups yet to see what they’re working on, so we’ll be doing that tomorrow. Oscar’s office mate is another intern, an EE senior from MIT, and she is working on scene-based AO. Scene-based AO is used when there is no conventional or laser guide star available, and it works by taking multiple frames of a scene, and comparing the two for movement due to turbulence. The associated problem is, of course, figuring out if the movement is indeed due to turbulence, and to attempt to correct for it, or if it due to movement of an object within the scene, and to leave it alone.
Last night, Oscar and I went to see Finding Nemo, because we don’t have a tv in our apartment. It was worth seeing, I was surprised to find; the plot was simple, but good, and the fact that the movie was computer-generated didn’t continually distract you from it. In fact, I wasn’t conscious of that at all.
Possibly relevant posts:
- Mission Accomplished (8/7/2003)
- Finding Out About (FOA) (10/10/2002)
- Lysergically yours (6/28/2005)