sey085

I'm sure this will come as somewhat of a shock to my regular readers, but curiously enough, I actually manage to get some work done here in Switzerland, every so often. Today was one of those days. As some of you have probably heard, the project I'm working on here is a micro-MRI system. Basically, we want to take microscopic MRI's of interesting chemical or biological samples. My job was to build the "gradient" imaging system which is responsible for making the "pictures" -- if you've ever been in an MRI, you'll also recognize it as the thing making the horrible, loud noises that you hear. Although there have been a lot of ups and downs -- mainly downs -- I finally have the prototype system up and mostly working. Last night I took an image, and this morning I did some very, very basic analysis of the data. Here is the result: Fig. 1: MRI image of PDMS sample. The x and y scales are in microns (0.001 mm), thus the total range of the image...

In theory, the focus of this blog isn't "what I did while my parents were in town," but rather "let's make fun of Switzerland," so with that in mind, this will (for the most part) be my last post about my parents visit. Fortunately, it involves a good deal of Swiss oddity, so I think everyone will be happy. Let's see, last we left off we were watching community musical theater in Rennes. After that, we drove down to the Loire Valley, checked out a troglodyte community, went to a couple of castles, and saw a huge swath of the French countryside. Our final stop in France was the former Roman town of Autun. If you are in Burgundy, I recommend stopping in Autun: it's a neat little town which still has it's original Roman wall, an awesome Romanesque cathedral, and ruins of an impressive Roman temple outside the walls. Although the most famous part of the cathedral -- the tympanum -- was closed off for restoration, you could still see the awesome ...

After leaving Paris, we headed north toward Normandy and Brittany. As none of us had ever been, we decided that our first big stop should be the mystical Mont Saint Michel. As it is one of the most touristed destinations in France, we decided to book a hotel room on the opposite side of its famous bay. Our first view, therefore, was quite impressive: Fig. 1: "A shoreless bay stretched before me, as far as eye could see: it lay between opposing coasts that vanished in distant mist; and in the midst of this vast tawny bay, under a gleaming golden sky, a strange hill, somber and peaked, thrust up from the sands at its feet. The sun had just sunk, and on a horizon still riotous with color was etched the outline of this fantastic rock that bore on its summit a fantastic monument." -- Guy de Maupassant, "The Horla". As awesome as it looks from across the bay, Mont Saint Michel is even more impressive from close up. Fig. 2: The dynamic duo, almost totally occluding the...