today's the day

I am currently at my mother's house waiting to take a shower. I am going across the river to free geek today to finish up the server I am building for the Nanocrystallography database at school, upon which time I will be showered with praise, kudos, and accolades. Anywho, I am working tomorrow and so I have to wash my work clothes before I leave the house today, however, my mom is doing a load so I have to wait for that to finish. I've already cleaned my room so I thought this the perfect time to write a blog.
I am very excited to join the Nanocrystallography Group at Portland State University, and I'm quite proud of how I got in (I was supposed to discover mistakes in a paper but instead discovered one the Professor didn't even know about) but so far I'm just a glorified CPU grease monkey. Which is fine by me, I guess, cause you all know how much I like to work on computers: more than most things, except maybe sex. But it's at least as fun as beer, food, or television. I know it's not really hip to like tv these days here in hippie ville, but there are some really good shows on right now. There is a specific list of shows that I watch;

That 70's show
NUMB3RS
Boston Legal
How I met your Mother
Big Bang Theory (funny!!)
Two and a Half Men
Mad Men
My Boys
Burn Notice
King of the Hill
Tony Bourdain's No Reservations
and the numerous space documentaries on the Science Channel

I rarely deviate from this list. I watched Apollo 13 when it was on the other day, and that was pretty rad. I don't think I started this blog to talk about TV, though.

Oh yah, my professor, advisor, and head of our group asked me what I wanted to do for the rest of the summer, since I probably will have this server finished within the next week or so, and he approved the only thing I could think of that I want to do.

I GET TO LEARN THE MICROSCOPE!!!!!

Now, this is no ordinary microscope. First of all, it's about 7 feelt tall and worth a cool million $. There is only one of them at our school, and we have special additional machinery of which there are only 3 in the world. It is a Scanning Electron Microscope. As we may have discussed in the past, there are some limitations to the Nanoscience field. Many of these limitations have only recently been overcome. The major one involves visualization and imaging.

Let's look at the prefix 'nano'. Nano is really just another SI prefix, like Mega, milli, tera, or Giga. Each of these is a power of 10 (mega is 10^6, milli is 10^-3) and nano is equivalent to 10^-9. Now these prefixes can be put on any number of units of measurement, from temperature, to pressure, and even radioactivity, but in the case of nanoscience, it refers specifically to the measurement of size. The nanometer is 10^-9 meters, or .000000001 meters. That is very, very small, approaching the size of the atom. The difficulty in dealing with this small size is that traditional methods of imaging are inadequate: light microscopes are unable to view them because this scale is smaller than the wavelength of light, .0000003-.0000007 meters.
A new method therefore had to be developed, and so it was. The electron microscope involves shooting electrons at a specimen, and measuring either the ones that bounce off, the ones that tunnel through (that's a whole ball of wax we won't get into right now), or both. The reason electrons are acceptible for this is that when excited with electricity they have wavelengths approaching 2 angstroms, or 2x10^-10th  meters, just small enough. Unfortunately the first one of these wasn't invented until the late 30's, compared to microscopes, which have been perfected for literally hundreds of years. Only recently has the resolution I mentioned even been achieved. So the point is, many of the things we have been able to do with traditionally sized materials and subjects are only now being invented and perfected at the Nano scale.

So anyway, I get to learn the microscope. The laundry is done so I am going to go now.