sey085

It is springtime, which means that it is finally time to get outside, get some exercise, and work off all of those wonderful winter fondues. The last couple of weeks have been beautiful here (high 50s!), so it has not been hard to motivate myself to get outside and go running. Further, I am motivated by the fact that on the 24th of April, I will again be competing in the 20km de Lausanne . Now, given that I would like to do much better this year than last year, I have come up with a two-part strategy for success. Crosstrain! Do not have fondue (and wine) with Serge in Geneva the night before the race. With this plan, I cannot go wrong. Undoubtedly, some of you out there are asking, how do you intend to crosstrain? The answer is, of course, step aerobics. A few weeks ago, Jens, my officemate, and I went down to the Centre Sportif to sign up for gym passes for the semester. Now, the EPFL/UNIL gym is not particularly impressive -- even though there are ten times as many students, it...

Lately, things at work have not been going particularly well. My main project (since my arrival) has been to build a set of gradient coils which are the basis of a magnetic resonance microscope. My problem, of late, has been that for reasons unknown to me, my gradient coils have developed a nasty habit of killing themselves in the middle of a measurement. What does a dead gradient coil look like? Here's an early kill of mine: Fig. 1: A destroyed coil. The red lines are wires which carry very large currents (up to 100 A) but for only very short times (no longer than one millisecond). The Aluminum frame transports the heat away from the wires and is connected to a water cooling system. Notice the dark charring, the melted plastic, and the overall ugliness of the situation. When something like this happens, I have to scrape out all the bad stuff, replace everything and start over. It is a time-consuming and boring process and one at which I have become far too skilled. With ...