The unpublishables

Since my last post, the machine at Princeton has melted down and I've moved to Cambridge, MA to work on a new machine at MIT. A week after I got to MIT, the President's budget request and the Department of Energy cut enough money from the program I'm working in that the machine at MIT is now scheduled for closure next year. We're not taking all this lying down, but the shakeup has pushed us to get as much as we can out of the program while it's still going. I've managed to pull some pretty neat results out of the hardware I've been working on at MIT, and am trying to get LLNL to patent part of it while I reduce some papers out of the rest. Still, with the future budget and programmatic uncertainty, I'm not sure if I'll be able to continue in this position next year, so I'm on the job market again.

One thing I've found frustrating along the way of my present position is the amount of work I've done which hasn't resulted in the critical mass to justify publication. Neither of the two projects I worked on at Princeton will likely ever see publication, so I can only hope that the next person working on them will find my reports so they can pick up where I left off. Mr. Kurt Schwehr has an awesome solution to this problem: just blog about what you're doing as you go so that you leave a record of what you're doing. I'll give that a try for a while through this blog, so here goes.