End week 2

I meant to post this last night but our wireless died around 10. It just now went back up.

I've been feeling tired these past few days, so I've fallen behind with the blogging. Sean and Johanna were (and still are) sick this week, and Michelle was sick before them, so I'm trying to avoid whatever's going around with OJ, sleep, and food.

On Thursday, I finished reading Chichkov et al's "Femtosecond, picosecond, and nanosecond laser ablation of solids" article. His results are fairly predictable to me now that I've read quite a few papers; fs lasers reduce thermal effects and make for cleaner ablation than ns pulses, although ps pulses also fair pretty well. Chichkov actually went into some of the thermodynamics behind the 2 step model, which I followed as best I could, but he skipped quite a few steps and my grasp on Thermodynamics is par at best. I also spent some of Thursday and then Friday reading a paper on the formation of corrosion products of Copper in the presence of sulfur. Since I'll be ablating primarily wartime nickels, primarily copper, and since sulfur was strongly present during the war years due to its use in an industrial setting, that seemed like a good choice for starters. Bianca asked me to make a table of the results of the papers I've been reading, so that should be up here today, hopefully.

By some coercion, bribery, devilry, or blackmail, Corinne manage to get me an opthamologist appointment for Friday, which I happily took. We got lost on the way there, one of the procedures made me very dizzy and light-headed, and I got lost finding my way to the RER station afterward (promptly followed by a second trek of the day up the Palaiseau hill) but I finally have lab clearance.

On a personal note, we went to Versailles on Saturday with students from Paris tech. The gardens are quite fantastic.
Hey, these statues look somewhat dirty/corroded. Maybe they'd let me irradiate them. I mean, really, what's the difference between a 60 year old coin and a 300+ year old statue?