Sunday, August 13, 2006

ANL's albino midget deer

Last Monday, a colleague and I had 24 hours of beam time on the synchrotron at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Lab. While I won't dwell on the nerdy scientific application we were trying out, there are few weird things about APS that are worth sharing. 1) The main mode of transportation inside the synchrotron is the adult-sized tricycle. Fun to ride, but hard to steer. 2) There is a mysterious network of above-ground pipes that goes all over the campus. The pipes take crazy 90° bends have lots of nonsensical twists. An ANL scientst told us that the "local lore" is that these are steam pipes that deliver heat to the buildings, but the fact that that this is "lore" suggests to me that their true purpose must be much more secret. 3) The lab campus is populated by the freakiest deer I have ever seen (in fact, they look more like big goats aside from their huge antlers). Liz and I had a close encounter with two ghostly stags in the middle of the night, which was pretty cool but also kind of creepy.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

1) where can I get a tricycle of my own?
2) were you riding underneath the nifty curvy particle track?

kt said...

1) Here are some nifty tricycles.
2) You don't ride under the ring. The walkway/trikeway is an outer loop around the outside.