Thoughts of a neglectful/preoccupied blogger...

Ok, so the posts here have been few and far between, but I do have several very good reasons, not all of which I will go into here... :P But suffice it to say that I've been running experiments on a synchrotron in Chicago for the past week, finished last night, and have just gotten back to my hotel room tonight and turned on the TV for the first time since arriving in the US last Wednesday. In the meantime, I've collected just slightly more than 2TB of pictures of tiny little pieces of different types of cement spinning around in circles in front of X-ray beams, which we hope to use to learn all sorts of things about what's going on inside them. So, I think it's fair to say I've been reasonably hard at work...

But work aside, I do have a handful of comments on a variety of assorted issues, just in case you'd been missing my apparent inability to hold a train of thought for more than three consecutive sentences:

- I flew here on the new Airbus A380 that Qantas is running on some of the Melbourne-LA flights, and it's a very nice smooth, quiet plane. The self-service snack bars for those in the cheap seats are also a very nice touch. However, I'm not convinced that it's quite as beautiful a piece of engineering as the 747, which remains my favourite plane of all - bearing in mind that it's been flying commercially for just short of 40 years (starting 1970), the 747 is a wonderful thing. The feeling of a fully-loaded 747 powering up for take-off is unlike any other commercial plane I've ever been in - the A380 is more powerful, but it's so heavy and lumbering that it just doesn't have the same blast of acceleration as it fires up.

- On the flipside, I flew the rest of the way (LA to Chicago) on an American Airlines Super-80. These are a dreadful plane - basically an updated DC-9, with the engines mounted straight on the fuselage at the back, a T-tail, and a long skinny fuselage. What all of this means is that they're painfully noisy, and (to the best judgement of my fairly sensitive stomach) pitch and roll around too much as they fly. It also doesn't help that the last two times I've gotten on AA Super 80 flights, the captain has felt the need to mention in his pre-flight welcome speech the fact that everything on the plane is working nicely today - suggesting that this is something of an achievement, and that we should be grateful for it. I've never heard this from any other pilots before, and it's not entirely a wonderful thing...

- On a completely different note, tonight I saw for the first time a couple of the "famous" white deer which live on the Argonne National Lab sight. Add that to the skunk and the racoon that I saw last time (both the first ones I'd seen alive in the wild, roadkill on the highways of PA doesn't count!), and it seems they've got a good assortment of critters living in this little chunk of forest and science-y stuff in the Chicago suburbs.

- And if anyone wants to read a really interesting story (most of which is probably true, although certain events are bound to have been exaggerated by the participants, there's an article here about some goings-on at NASA a few years ago...