September 12, 2014
September 6, 2014
September 1, 2014
August 27, 2014
June 1, 2014
May 1, 2014
March 14, 2014
2014 GRC on Mechanical Systems in the Quantum Regime
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| Reunited with the Harris Group! |
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| Wandering the boardwalks. Harris lab takes the necessary safety precautions. Not pictured: pretty much everyone else from our lab. So many cameras, so few pictures. |
January 22, 2014
D-League Throwdown
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| Two of the four (?) physics hockey teams, shortly after a heated battle for worst IM team in Canada. |
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| A shot on goal! |
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| Angry face! |
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| Stunned face! |
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| Self-deak! |
October 11, 2013
Group Photos
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| Back Row (left to right): André Provost, Abeer Barasheed, Chris McNally, Andre Diamant-Boustead, Chandra Curry, Simon Bernard, Laurent René de Cotret, Jack Sankey, Echo Front Row: Bogdan Piciu, Max Ruf, Alexandre Bourassa, Christoph Reinhardt, Tina Müller |
September 16, 2013
September 9, 2013
September 5, 2013
September 2, 2013
X-Rays Caught on Tape
I recently bought a cheap DSLR, and because it's still shiny and new to me, I found myself wondering if it would pick up any evidence of the x-rays inside the scanner at the airport. So before running my carry-ons through, I put the lens cap on, pushed "record", and aimed it face-down near the top of a bag. Here is the result:
x-rays.mp4
You can hear the rolly-bars on both ends, and I think the camera enters the x-ray machine around second 28, just after "okay, cool." Random pixels (red, blue, white) fire more and more as it nears the scanning area, and you can hear some machinery "clunks" correlated with bigger bursts of noise (maybe a shutter?).
The fun question now is what exactly are we seeing? And why do I still call it "tape"?
Cheers!
August 5, 2013
Max Ruf Has Arrived!
Welcome to Max, a DAAD RISE summer student! His project will be to help us harness the power of our 40W CO2 laser for good (not evil).
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| Beep! |
July 23, 2013
New Family!
On July 14th, Lily Childress and I said our vows on a mountain in the Adirondacks.
And now, something nerdy:
The plan was to simultaneously flip these coins until they agreed, and use the result as our family name (so no one can say there was ever any disagreement). To our surprise, they agreed on the first flip.
Apparently using the design to weight the coin can only take you so far. We recovered from the flip, said our vows, descended the mountain, and filled out the necessary paperwork in town at the Town of Harrietstown Town Court. Harrietstown is a town.
Strangely, if you are a citizen of Quebec, you cannot change your last name by law. However, such coins could still be useful for naming children or choosing who gets to pick out the ice cream flavor this week, Lily.
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| Echo, Lily, and Jack at the top of Blueberry Mountain |
And now, something nerdy:
A Scalable Solution to the Choice of Last Name
Lily and I both felt strongly about having the same last name. However, the usual hyphenation scheme is not a scalable, and none of the hybrid names involving "Sankey" and "Childress" appealed to either of us.
To choose a last name, we had two coins 3D printed in silver using shapeways and this python script. The script converts two gray-scale images into a height map defining the faces of the coins and creates a 3D model (OBJ file) for upload to shapeways. A few weeks after submitting the 3D model, we had polished silver coins with our names on them. Incredible.
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| meaningful metal objects |
The plan was to simultaneously flip these coins until they agreed, and use the result as our family name (so no one can say there was ever any disagreement). To our surprise, they agreed on the first flip.
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| gasp |
Apparently using the design to weight the coin can only take you so far. We recovered from the flip, said our vows, descended the mountain, and filled out the necessary paperwork in town at the Town of Harrietstown Town Court. Harrietstown is a town.
Since I spent a stupid amount of time figuring out this script, I thought I would publish it. If you are interested in making coins or discs, feel free to try this script out. Here is how it works:
- Install python, numpy, and mayavi. Or just install the enthought / python(x,y).
- Download the script coin.py into a directory containing two gray-scale images: "top.png" and "bottom.png". These images define the height map of the top and bottom of the coin. I recommend using Inkscape to design the images.
- Double-click the script. It's horribly inefficient, but after a few seconds, a preview plot should pop up. If it does, then you will probably find the file "coin_mesh.obj" in the same directory.
- Upload the generated "coin_mesh.obj" to shapeways, specifying units of millimeters, pick a material and go!
You can edit the script to modify other parameters such as the coin diameter, thickness, and height of the features. Using the default parameters, the output might look like this. Notes:
- Currently the script re-samples the image in a "pie" grid, using nearest-neighbor sampling, so make sure to blur your image!
- Also ensure the features you care about are larger than the minimum resolution for the shapeways material of choice.
- Shapeways has a maximum number of mesh triangles (currently ~1,000,000). Changing the resolution (R0) or size (D) can alleviate problems surrounding this issue.
If you use or improve the script, let me know!
Happy decision making,
Jack
May 29, 2013
It all happened so fast!
Some photos of the lab assembly over the last few months:
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| Bedrock lab space, with everything moved out of the way, awaiting the optics tables. |
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| Riggers rigging. |
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| 5 ft x 10 ft x 12 in thick optical table for optics experiments. |
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| 4 ft x 6 ft x 24 in table with a low center of gravity for highly vibration-sensitive experiments. |
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| May 15th |
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| May 15th |
May 6, 2013
May 1, 2013
February 26, 2013
Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship!
http://publications.mcgill.ca/reporter/2013/02/sankey-awarded-sloan-research-fellowship/
http://www.sloan.org/sloan-research-fellowships/2013-sloan-research-fellows/
Special thanks to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation! This is an enormous help to our research program.
http://www.sloan.org/sloan-research-fellowships/2013-sloan-research-fellows/
Special thanks to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation! This is an enormous help to our research program.
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