Uni woes, part deux.

There's this one thing of note that I forgot to mention in that last post about the banality that is my uni course. My group, which includes a rather hot American ex-pat, started on our experimental physics lab project (involving the Mossbauer Effect), down in the third-year laboratory where the equipment for it lives.

The third-year lab is an amazing place. It's packed with various apparatus. Some of them are new, some are old and some ancient but still in excellent working order. And another thing that the third-year lab holds within its walls: radioactive sources. Our experiment uses the gamma decay of ⁵⁷Co (cobalt-57) to ⁵⁷Fe (iron-57). And seeing as I'm the one least likely to have kids, I volunteered to man-handle the equipment. I only have the future children of my lab partners in mind, of course. It's funny how us physics students are so blasé about radiation. But one mention of it amongst the hoi polloi results in mass hysteria.

Anyway, the windows of look right onto the path from St Paul's College, which passes within metres of radioactive neutron sources down in the back corner of the room. Despite being sheathed in a castle of lead blocks, there's still an exclusion zone that extends for a couple of metres away from it and into the lab. Yet on the opposite side and protected only by a pane of glass, spunky college boys (whom I couldn't help but perve on when they walked past) are exposed to neutrons every day on their sojourns to class and back. A case of schadenfreud? Possibly.


Listening to:
Title: The Hero Dies In This One
Artist: The Ataris
Album/station: So Long Astoria (2003)
Length: 4.06