Sunday 18th November 2007
This morning’s commute to RAL was more stressful even than the one with the Americans. The train journey was uneventful but, it being a Sunday and buses being nonexistent, RAL treated us to a free taxi ride. The driver was something of a maniac. After what my bladder informed me was the longest and least controlled aquaplane I’ve ever been treated to, he jovially remarked: ‘That’ll keep the bottom of the car clean!’ I laughed politely whilst carefully fluffing my hair into the most effective crash helmet I could muster.
Somehow, however, we survived and escaped the clutches of the cackling, taxi-driving madman, leaving him to perform whatever deeds the in-car radio demanded of him at life-threateningly high speed.
We’re currently using a machine called ARGUS, which stands for Advanced Riken (a Japanese funding council of sorts) General-purpose (weak) μSR (really weak) Spectrometer. It pisses me off when people use the lower case Greek letter mu as a u. I know that they look kind of similar, but if you’re going to transliterate it, it’s an m, so the acronym should really be ARGMS, or perhaps ΑΡΓΜΣ if we’re going to go the other way. I suppose the Japanese people who funded and therefore presumably named it should get some credit though—if I were called upon to make an acronym in Japanese…well, can you even make an acronym in a non-alphabetic written language? I don’t know.
I imagine the Ancient Egyptians went through the motions with the pyramids.
‘Pharoah, we have completed the construction of cloth–man sitting down–Eye of Horus.’
‘What do you mean, worthless slave?’
‘Oh, sorry, your living-deity-ness, it’s just a little abbreviation the Israelites have been using around the camp—it’s short for cloth–falcon–woven basket—man sitting down–Anubis–cobra–reed—Eye of Horus–Thoth–holy scarab beetle.’
‘Ohhhh, cloth–falcon–woven basket—man sitting down–Anubis–cobra–reed—Eye of Horus–Thoth–holy scarab beetle!’
‘Yes, mighty pharaoh.’
‘That’s a fucking mouthful. What can we call it for short?’
Today’s experiment involved calibrating the muon apparatus by plotting a degrader curve—you keep putting stuff in the way of the beam (each little bit of which is a ‘degrader’ because it ‘degrades’ the beam—geddit?) until the muons can’t penetrate any more. Turns out it takes somewhere around six layers of silver foil to stop a beam of muons. Not silver foil as in kitchen foil, you pleb—actual silver foil. Silver has a very low nuclear moment, you see.
That said, RAL doesn’t appear to be a place averse to using extremely everyday equipment in its cutting-edge condensed matter research. The difference between ARGUS and EMU—the one I was using last time—seems to be primarily the brand of hairdryer they use. The hairdryers over this side of the experimental hall are silver Vidal Sassoon numbers—silver plastic, not actual silver—and, to my mild amusement at least, the same model as my girlfriend uses to dry her hair of a morning. The only difference is that these have been made impossible to steal by addition of a green Riken label, the universal smothering of stuff with which is the other key difference between the EMU and ARGUS beam lines.
I also noticed that there seemed to be a lot of silver foil of the usual, aluminium type lying about. Indeed, in the air-conditioned room full of banks of electronics next to the control room, a whole rack has connections covered in the stuff, clipped on with clothes pegs. Apparently, until it recently broke, the samples for muon analysis were prepared using a sandwich bag sealer bought from Oxford’s very own sixties throwback department store, Boswells. To even step in there makes you feel like you are entering the very antithesis of high-tech; it’s homely in a kind of creepy, outdated kind of way which lends a slightly unnerving edge to getting prescriptions from the pharmacy, the alternative in Oxford to feeding money into the slavering corporate chops of Boots, as you wonder whether they had antibiotics in the era of this particular style of laminate flooring.
I suppose if it’s good enough for the physicists of a World-leading pulsed muon source, it’s good enough for me.
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Tom F says
08:04:03 08/12/2007
in Japanese they do pretty much what you joked about with Ancient Egypt. 略語 (ryaku-go) means "abridged/shortened words", and involves things such as this...
The proper word for vending machine is 自動販売機 "jido-hanbaiki" (automatic vend machine), but it is frequently referred to as "ji-hanki" 自販機 (self trade machine).
It's even more frequent with foreign names... Starbucks, for example, should be called Su-taa-ba-ku-su, but is usually called "su-ta-ba", which unfortunately sounds like an occupation for someone wanting to be arrested for murder.
Even more incomprehensible is bloody Mr. Donut (sorry, American company, poor spelling)... that becomes simply "misser Dough".
But, in general, the Japanese form of abbreviation basically involves taking some characters out, whilst maintaining the general meaning of the word. For the uninitiated, it's a lot easier to understand what's being talked about, than with most English abbreviations which make no sense unless you've already been introduced to the matter/subculture in hand. And physicists seem to reveal an incredibly lame sense of humour whenever they come up with them.