#1
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Gainful Employment
So, my sessional contract at Lakehead University is ended, and I've got something lined up for the next year. Having 12 months of employment is pretty unusual in my line of work, but the place I got hired is damn cool.
The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. It's the biggest science project Canada has left. It's a particle physics facility buried 2km down a nickel mine. I'll be the token chemistry, since particle physicists don't know how to chemistry. They want me to clean the trace uranium and thorium out of their detector medium. It's not every job interview where you and the interviewer get naked. The facility is under cleanroom protocols, so everybody going in has to shower. I thought I was done with research, but you don't say no to SNOLab. There's potential to continue the contract at the end of the year, but I suspect that's as much as I can stand living in Sudsbury. Hopefully my TV career will have taken off by then.
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The first run through of any experimental procedure is to identify any potential errors by making them. |
#2
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"So, what do you do for a living?"
"Eh, nothing exciting. I clean uranium and thorium out of a particle accelerator built in an old nickel mine." (My entire family would respond with a collective scream of COOLEST JOB EVAR!!11!!!11!)
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Any truth is better than indefinite doubt. — Sherlock Holmes "The Adventure of the Yellow Face," Arthur Conan Doyle |
#3
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It's not a particle accelerator, it's just a huge tank full of soap (it used to be heavy water, but they're using a different detector medium now).
And the nickel mine is still running. We have to take a cage down and wait for the miners to get off first. But apart from that, coolest job ever. /although it's not every interview where both you and the interviewer get naked
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The first run through of any experimental procedure is to identify any potential errors by making them. |
#4
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Which perforce leads to the question "How does one clean soap?"
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Any truth is better than indefinite doubt. — Sherlock Holmes "The Adventure of the Yellow Face," Arthur Conan Doyle |
#5
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With great difficulty. Fortunately, I don't have to clean the soap, I just have to clean the tellurium they're spiking it with.
They've already got a system set up, and it's the same approach I would have taken. I'm not entirely sure what they need me for, honestly.
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The first run through of any experimental procedure is to identify any potential errors by making them. |
#6
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Good luck!
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My 5MV webpages My novel fivers list Yup “There must have been a point in early human history when it was actually advantageous to, when confronted with a difficult task, drop it altogether and go do something more fun, because I do that way too often for it to be anything but instinct.” -- Isto Combs |
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