plasma school

Down at UCLA, I enjoyed another 6-day plasma science winter school. (I previously attended in 2007.) Plasma science is mysterious, but when you couple good theory (pencil and paper work) with the enormous computing power that's we're developing. We covered several topics, listed below, but the funnest was probably the astrophysics.
* Learned something about how magnetic field is generated on large scales -- earth's magnetic field; galaxies' magnetic fields; magnetic fields in the universe in general.
* Learned some new stuff about turbulence and associated heat transfer in both astrophysics and in fusion devices.
* Learned more about shocks in fluids and in plasmas.

It's hard to convey how neat some of the computer simulations were, but here is a picture of one of the sims. The full sized movies (which I can't round up online right now) and images were more impressive.

Here's a picture of the aftermath of Tycho's supernova, the shell of which is a plasma shock wave:

Here are some pictures of the crab nebula. It has a pulsar at its core. Image in optical spectrum on left. Infrared (?) taken by Hubble on right.

Now the Crab nebula in xray:

Met lots of cool people. The U Wisc Madison crew was especially fun. We went out one night and ended up hanging out at one of the plasma labs where we drank a few beers and some British guys showed us how to play cricket -- the game seems quite strange to me.

Had an afternoon off on Wednesday. Went down to the beach to enjoy the 70 deg weather. I jogged from Santa Monica to Venice and back. At sunset, I took this photo of Ci using some rings. I'd never seen this kind of set of rings before. Some kids were doing some spectacular acrobatics on them...

Note the ferris wheel on the Santa Monica pier in the background. It was fun to ride that.

One evening Ci and I went to the nice outdoor track at UCLA. I ran a mile in 5:53. I was shooting for 6 min. I incorrectly calculated that I needed to run four laps at 1:20 per lap. Because I aimed for this pace (which would've given me a 5:20 mile), I managed to average 1:28 per lap... :) Then I did a 100 meter sprint to see how slow I am. On the first try, I set a new world record at 9.5 sec. Then we realized I hadn't run quite far enough. My time was 13.7 sec. Not bad.

At sunset that eve, I didn't see it, but some people saw a "green flash" at sunset. On my flight home, I looked for the flash, but evidently conditions weren't right. I did get this cool pic tho: