I've been asked to give a talk at my alma mater in a week. (Abstract!) I'm looking forward to it!

While reviewing my slides I'm putting together, I ran across these fun facts:

Highest elemental melting point: Tungsten (74W), ~ 3,400 C
Temperature of Sun’s surface ~ 6,000 C
Fusion reactor: ~ 20,000,000 C

This is why I like fusion. And preparing talks like this -- because it reminds me just how awesome it is to be working on real fusion devices. :)

I just found out in this last week, after being able to borrow a Phantom v. 7.3 camera from PPPL!

Shiny New Movie (2.5 M DivX-encoded AVI)

Pretty darn spiffy, huh? :) Now I just need to write some image processing software...

I don't toot my own horn very often, but I feel like this is a good time to do so.

I spent the first year or so of my PhD research developing an obscure, cross-platform library called mdscwrap that lets certain programming languages (LabView, C, and Igor Pro) easily interface with MDSplus, a data archival and storage system that has become the de facto standard to the fusion community. After getting the package off the ground, I started doing science with it and have gone from there.

From time to time, I get requests from research groups across the nation to try out my library. I just got my first international request today. So, my distribution's gone global. Not bad for a graduate student project, huh? :)