At pizza night we talked about Harriet Tubman. If you don't know the story of Harriet Tubman, she was a famous American woman who escaped from slavery in Maryland before the American Civil War and then came back and helped countless other slaves escape. She later became a spy for the Union army. An all-around badass. At one point there was a bounty of $40,000 on her head. And that's in 1860s money! Apparently she was never to be seen without her trusty colt pistol or a rifle. At the time it was illegal to sell weapons or ammunition to black people and illegal for black people to possess said items. Harriet used her gun to protect the people on her secret trail to freedom, and also to threaten escaped slaves who got scared and wanted to turn back. She knew that she couldn't have anyone who knew about the "underground railroad" get captured or turn back, because then the whole thing would end up being compromised. I had started to question whether or not individuals should have so much freedom to own and use guns, but if there was ever an argument for why this important, Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad is it. We talked about this in remembrance of Black History Month. Apparently Germany and several other countries have a Black History Month, but not France. The speaker said sarcastically that she couldn't see it happening any time soon, but I don't know why. In my experience French people are only really racist against Arabs and gypsies.

Out of the people at pizza night maybe a third of them were black, but only one of them was from the US. Even he was a second generation immigrant from Kenya. I think the speaker expected them to be more ardently into supporting Harriet Tubman, but mostly they just asked questions like, "Was she crazy?" One of them said, "So the slaves..." and the woman corrected "The ENSLAVED" and the girl kind of rolled her eyes and was like, "the enslaved". Afterwards I had some cocoa with a girl from Zimbabwe and a guy from London. They were discussing what it was like to be black. He, with his British accent and his prep-school education, she with her tales about lions and her troubled country. "They didn't let us play football [soccer] in school, really," he says. "They said it was a 'working man's game'. We played rugby in one season, cricket in the second season, and the third season we played tennis." At this moment he reminds me a little bit of Carlton Banks. I don't know how much he has in common with Harriet Tubman. But I dig them both.

At parkour I broke my entire self. I had a feeling that it would happen... on the way there it was bitterly cold and I was feeling like I might pull my hammy... but when the dust settled I had a badly pulled pectoral muscle and a giant swelling on my knee. I've been using a large bottle of Schmirnoff Ice as an ice pack. Luckily school vacations start on Saturday so I have at least a week for my pec to recover. I'm not modeling this week so my bruises will also have time to clear.

I talked to my good friend Rhodes [if you remember her vaguely]. She has a sweet high-powered job in my field and is generally a super-star. She was giving me advice on how to ace my job interview at NASA next month. She was also giving me the low-down on a bunch of faculty jobs that are apparently open or opening. There are 2-3 at John's Hopkins in Baltimore, two at Florida Institute of Technology, a couple at MIT (!??!), Purdue, Arizona State, University of Arizona, etc.

I have to decide what to apply for. None of these positions are in Santa Cruz, Montana, New Mexico, Hawaii, or Colorado, so that's not working in their favor. Indiana is like the worst state I've ever visited. [To be fair, it was in the dead of winter on a particularly terrible weekend.]

But seriously:



I just want to see some paaaaalm trees....

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I have to leave now for pizza night at the church.

We make the pizza in the church's kitchen. They have BBQ pizza. I'm going to die of delight while I eat it. I usually have like seven pieces, not even joking.

I've been listening to the soundtrack of Breaking Dawn. It is awesome. Every time I listen to it I start thinking about my new novel and I get distracted from my work.

All the same, I did a lot of work today figuring out all of the properties of sulfate aerosols, which was pretty fun.

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Yeah, this one is definitely after midnight Paris time. It's like 1:12 am. You guys can have the run-down of the day because that's what I write when I don't have time to think about what to write.

I went to work. I gave a presentation--- my first real presentation in French. It was a bit lame because some Russians came because they thought I was going to speak in English, but then the French people were like, "Aw, you practiced it in French? You should do it in French!!" and finally I did it in French, but I felt bad for my Russian comrades. Everyone liked it, but some people were like, "Great job! btw 'vitement' is not a word". [It's like someone saying, "fastly"]. I was like, "It may not be a word... but it SHOULD BE." Then my boss was all excited by my work and he came and explained a bunch of stuff to me. He also read the draft that I had given him a while back during my presentation so that he could give me comments on it. Sweetheart. I ate a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich for lunch because America is the greatest country on the face of the Earth.

I went to gymnastics, and we learned how to do round-offs. I learned how to do them when I was about 8, but I figured out tonight that I was doing them slightly wrong, and if I did them the way I was supposed to I got a big kick from the landing, which is exactly what you need to launch you into some back handsprings or something. Sweet. I also met a cool guy from Austria.

My pal J�r�my moved into my office. I really like having him there, it was pretty empty without the Canadian.

French A sent me an email informing me that he was going to a movie. I was like, "...and ?" I sadly had to inform him that OCG had already asked me to go to the movies with him... tant pis. OCG's friends were there, and they are all totally hilarious and fun just like him. I think I was the eldest by about four or five years. The movie that we saw, Flight, was a huge downer though (no pun intended?). Afterwards everyone was like, "Wanna grab a drink?" um...... no. Nobody's going to want to grab a drink for a while after watching that movie. Anyway, the movie got out after midnight, so I had no chance.

I came home and had a tortilla for dinner, because Mexico is the greatest country on the face of the Earth.

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This weekend was pretty full. On Saturday I went to a one-man show about Muslim-Christian relations which took place in the crypts of the cathedral of Saint Sulpice. I was doing some research for my novel, some of which takes place in the crypts, so I thought I should get a look. The show was good too, making cool use of the Hang, a sweet instrument that looks like a UFO.

From 4 til about 9 I was at parkour, and my group members and I came up with a hilarious and awesome choreographed parkour routine.

On Sunday I woke up and went to Mass at the Saint Sulpice (more research). Then I went to services at my normal American Church, and then me and all of my sweet church buddies went to Notre Dame to see the bells, which are currently on display in the nave of the church (they let us touch them!). They just cast a bunch of new ones to celebrate the 850th anniversary of the cathedral, and they're going to hang them and ring them for the first time at the end of February. SL thought it would be funny if they rang in some kind of crazy resonance that broke every single stained glass window in Notre Dame. You know, not 'funny' funny, but funny, uh... nevermind. [SL is awesome]. The largest bell of Notre Dame is 19 tons, and it is called Emmanuel. Some of the smaller ones were still the size of a person, weighing about ten tons. Once they hang them it will probably be hundreds of years before anyone really sees them again. We spent a while there and the 4:30 Mass started, so technically I went to three services today.

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Just wanted to say that I'm alive.

Ok real entry:

---

"Are you modeling?" says the woman with the beautiful green eyes. I nod. "I want to shoot you," she says.

Like I don't hear that line every day, amirite?

When I arrived at the address indicated on the internet, I was a little bit tentative. I was met by a man named Sergei who directed me into a plain, unfurnished bathroom. Inside were several wooden stools and two women, one of whom was applying makeup to the other. I had my makeup done and we went up to the photo shoot. There were probably twenty or more photographers and two models already posing.

It was obvious that none of the models were professionals, and several, like me, had never done a photo shoot. There were four of us all together, and two professional photo studio backgrounds-- white and black. The woman with the green eyes shot some random shots of me next to a mirror, and then I was on. Bright lights from every corner, the click of lenses from ten photographers at once. Paparazzi, man, that's what it's like. It isn't long before you run out of ideas on how to pose. Aren't the photographers supposed to tell you that? Isn't someone supposed to tell you to make love to the camera? No--- they're mostly amateurs, too. Finally I establish a rapport with my favorite photographers: Patricia, the french makeup artist, the woman with the green eyes, and Peter from Luxembourg. Peter from Luxembourg gives me ideas and I do them; I do things and it gives Peter ideas. Green Eyes likes to take photographs from the side where there is less competition. I had it in my mind to never do anything flirty or sexy, so I don't. I'm dressed pretty conservatively, but they snap away happily.

It's a weird dynamic. You pose, they snap photos.... you sense that you are losing their interest, you try a different pose... they react with a barrage of clicks. After watching the first two models unphotogenically struggle with self-doubt, the one thing I don't do is hesitate or look uncertain.

Mr. Photographer, I'm ready for my close-up
Make sure you catch me from my good side
Pick one

At the end of the night I signed photograph release forms. No posting the photos on Facebook, my release forms say. No using them in paid work. Ok to put them in your online portfolio. What can I say, we models have to protect our images... it's our livelihood.

After the shoot we went out for hot chocolate and I got to tell people what I really do for a living.... study volcanoes on Mars.

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In a moment I'm leaving to go to a MeetUp where we all go to a photo studio and take "fashion" photos of each other. This time I'm a "model", and the theme is "Masquerade". They have a person that does make up who is going to make us up beforehand.

Anyway, I'm leaving my computer at work so I'll be incommunicado until ma�ana.

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I'm pretty exhausted. Christophe wrote me an email. No, he wasn't asking me to drink expensive European cocktails in a trendy bar, he was just answering a question I had about whether or not the protons in his cyclotron were fast enough that he had to take relativistic effects into account. No, it wasn't a euphemism.

Ok, time for a back explanation:

I went to visit a couple of cyclotron facilities with the colleague of my sister's husband's father. The only reason I went was because the guy doesn't speak French and my sister's husband's father thought it might be nice to have someone along who did. He'd get a quasi-french-speaking companion, I'd get to see some weird labs and maybe eat a free lunch. I wondered what I should wear... I figured the American engineer would be wearing khakis, a blue dress shirt, and a pair of sensible brown shoes. This is exactly what he was wearing, though he also had an Land's End jacket and a leather hat from LL Bean. So Colorado. I figured the french engineers would be wearing black dress pants, dark sweaters, and dress shoes, which is also exactly what they were wearing.

I wasn't that much help... they would be like, "What is the word for airlock? What is the word for proton beam?" We managed to figure things out somehow. I did help at the beginning when we were lost in the hospital, and at the end when we were drinking wine and eating fine french cuisine.

We arrived at the hospital and ended up in radiopharmaceuticals. This is where we met our poor, lovelorn nurse and she told us that the cyclotron lab was upset with them because they'd recently lost a big contract with the hospital (see last entry). When we got to the bottom of the sketchy spiral staircase, she rang the bell for us and Christophe answered it. He had just sent someone out to find us. The nurse asked him how he was doing and tried to make some light banter, but he clearly had a lot of things on his mind. "We should get together to talk about the proposal," he said, 100% business. She laughed, but he wasn't laughing.

The company makes short-lived radionuclides that they mix with a glucose analogue. This mixture is injected into the veins of cancer patients, with the radionuclides acting as tracer particles. The glucose analogue is taken up by all cells which are making ATP out of glucose, but the faster the cells are metabolizing, the more they take up, and thus the more radioactive tracer particles enter them. As you might guess, cancer cells are rapidly metabolizing. When you scan the patient for radioactivity (gamma rays), the tumor lights up like a beacon, and you can take a detailed, 3-D image of it.


Thanks for the image, Wikipedia.

A cyclotron is a machine shaped like a hamburger with two giant D-shaped magnets inside. They use the magnetic field to accelerate protons to high speeds and then they collide the protons with a target made of water with oxygen-18, a more rare isotope of oxygen. The O-18 turns into Fluorine-18, which is radioactive, and which they use as the tracer in the body. It is well-suited for this purpose because it decays on the order of hours, so the patient doesn't have to be exposed to radiation for prolonged periods. The downside to this is that they have to start making the doses at one in the morning. At about 7 am the doses are shipped out, and by about 11 am they are administered to the patient. They have to calculate the rate of decay extremely precisely so that the dose will be correct at the exact moment that it is administered. This means that Christophe has to get to work every day at about midnight. Kills his chances to date our nurse, I must imagine.

"I used to work out at [city with a reputation for being sketchy], and for a year I didn't have my driver's license.... long story.... so I had to take the train and then walk to the facility. But I never had any problems," he said.

Everyone clearly wanted to hear the story, but Christophe did not indulge us. The handsome young man from finance who took us to lunch afterward told us that in order to have your license revoked for a year you'd have to have done something... quite... He raised his eyebrow and did not finish. Clearly if you run a lab filled with protons whirling at 1/5 the speed of light and giant tubs of nuclear waste being produced every week you'd have to drive fast and dangerously and gel your hair, too.

Almost everyone in the labs that we visited was a good-looking, late-20s-early-30s male, which was not at all what I expected. Nicholas, another chemist, told us that the labs have a pretty high turnover rate because of the totally insane hours. The economics behind this kind of operation is absolutely mind-boggling. The facility cost 11 million euros to build. Each tiny bottle of O-18-enriched water costs 2000 euros. Add to that the cost of running the giant cyclotron (in a vault), the cost of disposing of nuclear waste all the time, and the cost of keeping everything in the lab sterile, and you can see why cancer tests cost astronomical amounts. Even a small fluctuation in consumer demand can put a company dangerously close to disaster.

Even more worrisome has been the recent tendency of doctors to cheat on the dosage: They'll order 10 doses for 12 patients, or, in the worst cases, 5 doses for 10 patients. In order to compensate, they'll give the patients the doses well before the scheduled injection time to take advantage of the higher level of radiation.

That's when you hope that your doctor is good at arithmetic.

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We were clearly in the wrong lab-- we were in radiopharmaceuticals when we were meant to be in the underground cyclotron lab. The overworked young nurse that we were talking to offered to take us there herself. She said that she was pretty good friends with Christophe, who ran the cyclotron lab.

We went down the stairs, across the lobby, out of the building, and a block and a half down the street.

"They're actually kind of mad at us right now," she offered without prompting. "It's because they wrote a proposal to supply us with radiopharmaceuticals, but they didn't get the business. So we're right next door but we don't buy from them. But Christophe and I still get on quite well."

We walked down further, entered a courtyard, and descended a tiny metal spiral staircase. I was pretty impressed at how far out of her way this woman was taking us... it wasn't often that French people put themselves out so much on behalf of some strangers.


And then I saw Christophe.

And it all made sense.

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