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C'est tres chaud, en Marseille...
Jul. 6th, 2005 05:52 pmOr whatever the correct French is supposed to be. I never claimed to be any good at it. And, oddly enough, I'm not any good at it.
Well, I've not posted in a while, other than the odd comment in other people's journals. I've been busy. Very. Moved flat, wrote paper. Writing another paper. Went to conference, here, which just finished. Have some leads on postdoc funding, which would let me do space stuff.
The conference was a European Space Agency/CNES/USAF/one-other-organisation-I-can't-remember-the-acronym for conference about cool and unusual technologies for future application in space programmes. It was an odd combination of seemingly mundane (plastic helium tank, anyone? It's really cool. Well, cryogenic, actually), and really on the edge (full-on Drexler style nanotech, fusion propulsion, antimatter propulsion, one blokey who wanted to mine the outer planets for Helium, etc.). And actual working stuff, like high specific impulse ion thrusters capable of running literally for years uninterrupted. Lots of stuff about CMOS image sensors that would make the typical digital stills camera enthusiast keel over with pure lust, complete with test images with garden gnomes in them. Some interesting stuff on superconducting cryogenic digital circuits capable of running at hundreds of GHz. Interesting talks over lunch and dinner with people. I got to play with a little box, about 5cm x 3cm x 1cm containing a single chip MEMS accelerometer, pressure and humidity sensor, which (via Bluetooth) was sending data in real time to a laptop while I waggled it about and breathed on it.
Yep, I've had a good time. What can I say?
:-)
My talk went OK this afternoon. I was presenting the stuff I did at NASA Ames last year -- the talk seemed to go down quite well, and I seemed to get more questions than anyone else this afternoon, which is generally always a good sign.
Well, I've not posted in a while, other than the odd comment in other people's journals. I've been busy. Very. Moved flat, wrote paper. Writing another paper. Went to conference, here, which just finished. Have some leads on postdoc funding, which would let me do space stuff.
The conference was a European Space Agency/CNES/USAF/one-other-organisation-I-can't-remember-the-acronym for conference about cool and unusual technologies for future application in space programmes. It was an odd combination of seemingly mundane (plastic helium tank, anyone? It's really cool. Well, cryogenic, actually), and really on the edge (full-on Drexler style nanotech, fusion propulsion, antimatter propulsion, one blokey who wanted to mine the outer planets for Helium, etc.). And actual working stuff, like high specific impulse ion thrusters capable of running literally for years uninterrupted. Lots of stuff about CMOS image sensors that would make the typical digital stills camera enthusiast keel over with pure lust, complete with test images with garden gnomes in them. Some interesting stuff on superconducting cryogenic digital circuits capable of running at hundreds of GHz. Interesting talks over lunch and dinner with people. I got to play with a little box, about 5cm x 3cm x 1cm containing a single chip MEMS accelerometer, pressure and humidity sensor, which (via Bluetooth) was sending data in real time to a laptop while I waggled it about and breathed on it.
Yep, I've had a good time. What can I say?
:-)
My talk went OK this afternoon. I was presenting the stuff I did at NASA Ames last year -- the talk seemed to go down quite well, and I seemed to get more questions than anyone else this afternoon, which is generally always a good sign.
