I tested out a new partner in the Valley this weekend. He climbs well, better than me. But a silent guy.
Adam traversing to the chains on Ejesta (5.8) on Reed’s Pinnacle:
We mostly climbed in the 5.8-10ish range doing some routes on Reed’s, Five & Dime, and the Apron.
This year so far has been a washout for climbing. From shoulder surgery in January to a lack of quality partners in the spring and the summer, I haven’t accomplished any of my climbing goals for the year. But it is good to climb hard again. With some exceptions, if my body isn’t aching by Sunday evening than the weekend has been wasted.
I like Rock Empire cams, they remind me of older WC Friends. Mostly I have the equivalent to BD #4,5 and have found the cams to work very well. Hopefully this is an isolated incident.
A while back I posted on a GSI experiment that found electron capture in 142-Pr and 140-Pm followed a non-exponential decay law given by: . Twoother groups have looked for this oscillating decay curve and haven’t found it. The GSI response seems to be the environment in a storage ring is different than what is found in the other experiments. If you embed the nuclei in a material you somehow restrict the phase space which changes how the nuclei decay. Or something.
Today I saw this weird paper that finds an oscillation in the decay of 32-Si and 226-Ra that correlates with the sun-earth distance. It is really weird when you consider their two examples; 32-Si decays by -decay–a weak interaction process–while 226-Ra decays via -decay–where alpha-particles tunnel through the nuclear barrier. Basically there is no known physical process that could influence the decay curve and lead to a seasonal variation.
The authors state:
Although there are hundreds of potentially useful nuclides whose half-lives have been measured, the data from many of the experiments we examined were generally not useful, most often because data were not acquired continuously over sufficiently long time periods.
I’m not sure why they didn’t verify the 32-Si and 226-Ra examples before posting the paper. It would be easy to do and would make a good undergraduate project. Take a standard source such as 60-Co and/or 137-Cs and use a germanium or NaI detector to count the decays every other week for a year. One could do the same with a silicon detector and a standard -source.
I ran into Caldwell and Sjong in May while walking through the Manure Pile Buttress parking lot after we climbed Nutcracker. Didn’t have a chance to ask what they were up to but I was really curious.
L. and I are going to the east side of the Sierra for the next four days. L. has never been up to the High Sierra so I wanted to take her up Mt. Ritter and Banner but the weather looks like it is going to be crap. Maybe Death Valley? Who knows, we’ll play it as the conditions allow. My plan is to focus on photography rather than the hiking.
Last week I bought the 10-20mm F4-5.6 EX DC HSM lens. I wanted the faster Canon EF-S ultra-wide lens but I couldn’t justify the extra $200 dollars for it. In low light situations I figure I’ll be using a tripod anyway.
I went to Henry Coe State Park to try it out and also shot my girlfriend with her pet rats. So far I am not entirely impressed with the image quality but I also haven’t tried the lens with a tripod.
I returned to climbing for the first time since my shoulder surgery in January. Mostly I did easy stuff in the 5.7ish range though I did lead all routes.
I brought my dSLR with me for the first time on a climb. The original plan was to setup some good shots but the crowds discouraged spending a lot of time on photography.
Dave coming up to the belay on The Grack:
Looking down from the Apron:
Belaying:
The weekend was fun but I’m way out of climbing shape.
Sunday my beam time came up so I have been busy babysitting my experiment. The good news is that the experiment seems to be a success. It wasn’t without hiccups, we spent 10+ hours trying to calibrate the beam energy of the Tandem accelerator. But we eventually did so and the data looks good.
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-decay–a weak interaction process–while 226-Ra decays via 
-decay–where alpha-particles tunnel through the nuclear barrier. Basically there is no known physical process that could influence the decay curve and lead to a seasonal variation.
-source. 
