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Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til TBT – Japan

Tonight I just have to do a little "throwback Thursday": I've been going through a lot of my pictures as I've been preparing for Saturday's TEDx (sorry for talking so much about it, but it's pretty much all I've been doing today, and all I can think of 😉 ), and suddenly the folder was there - "Sushi&Nuclear" - and I had to take a peek.
In one way it feels like I was never there, and it was all just a dream... 
Of course it wasn't: It was such a great trip, and it would have been fantastic to go back again! 
<3

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Tomorrow I'm off to Bergen, and so far I have almost no clue as to what my outfit will be. I think my slides are almost a little too little pink (I just finished them, and emailed them off to Bergen), so I'm considering to wear pink to sort of balance it out. 
The only thing I'm pretty sure about is that these new, pretty little things from Nelly will be on my feet on Saturday...;) I am considering beige chinos and a pink top (and the shoes, of course) - what do you think?

Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til To know what you don't know…

As scientists I think we always really, really, REALLY want to understand whatever we're working on exactly how and why - but often on our way to the how and the why we step into different problems than the ones we were aiming at solving in the first place... I think we all can relate to saying "I don't know" can be difficult; making you feel like you've in some way failed, right? But maybe just as much as it being no fun feeling like a "failure", it can be very hard to see that knowing what you don't know can also be a result 🙂

Today we had a moment like this; realizing that what we don't understand, or don't know, is actually an important result in itself - and it is such a great feeling!

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(snaps from Instagram - @sunnivarose)
As earlier promised I'm trying to become better at girly outfit posting, so here's today's and yesterday's outfit: Same sweater - two styles! Yesterday (left picture) I styled it a little bit in the "preppy direction" - with a white shirt and a beige skirt, today more towards laid-back and comfy - with jeans and flats 🙂
Personally, I must admit I'm becoming more and more fond of the comfy style, and I really love my new, white (all white!) sneakers from Nelly, and the west from Gina Tricot. This west is seriously just perfect these days; on top of a sweater inside if it's a little chilly, or outside if it's suddenly not so chilly - or on top of a thin jacket if it's a tad bit colder outside.
Which look is your favourite?
<3<3<3

Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til "Could nuclear weapons save the planet?"
I haven't got through all that I had hoped to today, but at least I have decided on the title for my TEDx talk in just 5 days: Could nuclear weapons save the planet? 
The talk isn't finished yet, but at least I think I'm on the right track... Do you like the title? (No, I won't say anything more about the talk than what's already in the title, but if you're in Bergen on Saturday, you can come to NHH and see the entire conference live). This is my third TEDx talk in two years, and I really really want it to be the best that I can do!
BTW: I think I have decided on which shoes to wear - also an important preparation before a talk 😉

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Publisert 4 kommentarer til Facts on Friday (we pretend Monday = Friday) – EXPERIMENTS!

Since I wrote about my feelings about programming on Thursday, I got some comments and questions about how and why; which can be totally ok, but also a little annoying if it's more like "why on earth are you so stupid you're trying to do anything in C++" (no one said exactly that, it's just an example of a not very constructive comment). Like my friend, Anders (not my boyfriend, but my friend who is a boy - haha), said: "With programming you can do everything! (Except for saying out load which language you are using without someone telling you it's wrong.)"
Telling me stuff like "you have to hate yourself for choosing C++" is not exactly helping me (or anyone really), right? I didn't wake up one day and say to my self "hey, I think I want to program C++ for no reason what so ever - just because I enjoy feeling stupid". I need C++. So it's a little bit like telling your kid who is doing his/her algebra homework "you must really enjoy feeling stupid since you're doing this algebra stuff - you should work on statistics instead".
I love getting constructive comments or critique, but some comments are just making me feel more stupid than before (like: not only am I not managing the programming stuff, I'm also an idiot for trying to learn what I am learning...).
So I thought, today I want to give you ten FACTS about experiments and data analysis here at the nuclear physics group in Oslo - which is the main reason why I need any knowledge of programming these days. This is probably the geekiest (and perhaps most "technical") facts post I've had so far...but sometimes you have to be a little geeky, right? 😉
  1. The material we want to study can be almost anything - for example uranium, gold, nickel, molybdenum, iron, dysprosium, thorium or plutonium (these are just some examples of what we have experimented with the last couple of years)
  2. We make a tiny foil - a target - from the material (almost the size of a small coin), and put this inside all of our detectors
  3. There are always at leas two types of detectors for the experiments: Sodium Iodide detectors (they measure gamma rays), and Silicon detectors (they measure particles)
  4. The Sodium Iodide detectors are called CACTUS (cause it really looks like a cactus) <3 
  5. Sometimes we use more detectors than the gamma detectors (CACTUS) and the particle detectors - for example fission detectors (we used that for my uranium experiment, since uranium-233 fissions like crazy 😛 )
  6. To study the nuclei in the material we bombard the target with tiny particles; protons, deuterons (a proton and a neutron), helium-3 (two protons and one neutron), or helium-4 (two protons and two neutrons - same as an alpha particle 😀 )
  7. When a particle hits a nucleus in our target material, the nucleus gets some extra energy (sort of like it gets heated); then a particle goes out (it can be the same that went in, or it can be another one), and the target nucleus cools again, by sending out gamma radiation
  8. The different detectors will detect the different kind of stuff that comes out from the reaction in the target: the gamma detectors detect the gammas, the particle detectors detect the particles (protons, deuterons, helium-3, or alphas), and the fission detectors detect fission - the detection of all these thing are what we talk about as our data
  9. Data from the experiments we are performing in Oslo (like my uranium experiment) is typically 10-100 Giga Bytes - so it's kind of a lot 
  10. To sort all of these data we need codes/programs that go through everything and checks if there for example was a particle and a gamma that came out of the target at the same time, or maybe it was a particle and a gamma and a fission product, and what were the energie
    s of all this; the particles and the gammas - on the lucky side I don't have write theses sorting codes from scratch, on the other side I have to try to understand someone else's code and logic, which is not always very easy (when I don't understand I'm always sure it's because I'm stupid :/ )
- CACTUS <3 -
The sorting codes, and everything else I'm working on is written in C++, and that's the reason why that's the language I'm working on.
Happy Monday to everyone!


9

Publisert 9 kommentarer til To program or not to program?
I did not at all get through my TO DO list today, and I hate it...:/ (I didn't even get to start at what I had planned on doing.)
I was supposed to read the two papers I'm co authoring, work on my TEDx talk (for Bergen in just a little more than a week - HELP!), get through some of the emails on my endless unanswered emails list, and try to log into the computer that I used for reactor simulations a couple of years ago, to try to get one of the input files that should be there (I'm pretty sure I don't remember the password anymore 🙁 ).
Instead I ended up spending more or less all of the day "programming" - a.k.a. feeling so incredibly stupid. I really want to learn, and be better, but it's hard...I guess maybe I feel the same way about programming that some people do about math.

Tomorrow I have to be better! Not because it in any way is wrong to spend time on trying to work on my programming skills, but because I have deadlines, and right now there is unfortunately no room for anything else than what HAS to be done... Why does everything take so much time, especially things you need to learn like almost from scratch?!? *frustration*  

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Last night we celebrated science and the Norwegian Research Council's Festaften at Oslo Concert Hall. Here are a couple of pictures taken by Yngve Vogt:
- flirting with the boyfriend - 

- discussing with the professor - 

Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til My PhD ("dumbed down")
A couple of days ago I came across what I thought was a hilarious post on a web site: PhD theses dumbed down... My favourites are these:
  • Nanoparticles are weird and I accidentally made a bomb and electrocuted myself.
  • Inpatients with schizophrenia are happier and socialize more in the context of a music listening group. It was obvious before we began the project and we learned nothing.
  • Little things stick together. Here's a slightly easier way to calculate their stickiness. 
  • This protein looks like it might contribute to asthma. Oh, turns out it probably doesn't. 
  • Two proteins touch each other in a specific place in the developing heart. No idea if it's important for anything. 
  • People sometimes think about animals as if they're people. People like those animals a little more than regular animals. Except when they don't. I can't believe they gave me a PhD.  
  • Sand washes away, don't build important stuff on it.

Some of my friends, who have either finished their Phd's, or are in the middle of it, like I am, got inspired by this, and made their own "dumbed down" versions:

Jonathan: "All models are wrong, but at least now we can confirm they are wrong much faster"

Veronica: "Can electrons surf on an electric wave? Yes"

Kyrre: "How many sparks do we see when we push ridiculously strong micro waves through thin vacuum tubes? (And how do they work?)"

My thesis is, as many of you know, about issues with the thorium fuel cycle. Another day I think I will write a blog post about my thesis/project (so, a little bit more than just a one liner, but less than the entire thing - would you like that?), but it will have to be after I've finished my next paper, because after that I will hopefully know  a little more about how everything will be.
As of today, this is the best way I can "dumb down" my entire project, but I guess if it was just another day (when the weather was nicer, maybe, and it wasn't fall, and I wasn't feeling not like the best version of my self)I would probably write something different - maybe more positive :). Here goes:

Thorium is a nice thing for a nuclear fuel, but you get the f****** uranium-232 from it, and it makes everything s***. Now we kind of know a little bit more about it. Which is just sort of true.

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Here's yesterday's outfit - as I said I'm trying to be better at posting my outfits, and yesterday I was actually really satisfied with what i ended up wearing (after trying on, for example three different skirts and a pear of jeans) 🙂 My problem these days is, well, I actually don't really know what it is, but it's just hard :/  It takes forever to put together a simple outfit like the one from yesterday. Luckily I got "awarded" when I got to the University, and I bumped in to Anders, and he was like "wow, you look really great today" <3<3<3 

I'm very happy with my new, pink coat, that I ordered from Nelly.

top: Zara // ear rings: Snö of Sweden // coat: Nelly // scarf: HM // hair: I grow it my self // boobs: I grew them my self // eye lashes: au naturel (well, that's not exactly true; I do wear mascara, of course 😉 ) // skirt: 5 years old, don't remember where I bought it anymore // shoes: Bianco // lips: lipgloss from L'Oréal - otherwise they're like nature made them