Today I have had one of the most awesome days ever… and that is saying a lot seen as I have been having an absolutely fantastic summer.

Firstly I am attending the Women in Physics Conference (guy are welcome to attend too). The conference was established to help support women who are in Physics and encourage them (Physics has a very small percentage of females in all levels of education). I don’t know how I feel about having a conference geared primarily toward women, I do think that things should be equal… but so far things have been amazing!

Today I started my day off going to a couple of talks/ discussions at Irving K. Barber. They were really interesting, inspiring… and I actually understood quite a lot of what was going on! Then I skipped a couple of talks to head over to the robot competition that the 2nd year EngPhys students have in the summer. There was a huge audience, probably 200-300 people. It was really exciting to watch and the robots were really, really cool. It was especially interesting seen as almost every robot had different mechanisms for lifting and stacking blocks. Mech 2 competitions have nothing on this one =P A video overview is here:

http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Video+Robot+Wars/7033424/story.html

As soon as I got to TRIUMF I took a look at the cloud chamber there once again. I have been working on making one this summer, and although my partner and I got an almost working one going. We got a little stuck when the ion trails were not forming.

Also they conducted TRIUMF tours while we were there. I have already been around TRIUMF once, but was really excited going again, and it was really cool to see for a second time around and look at all the details. Also, the beam was on, which meant that the electromagnets were turned on. You can stand above the electromagnets (that are under about 15 metres of concrete) and have a paper clip almost float in you hands! It is crazy seeing wires standing straight upright without being able to pop away. I wanted to take a picture… but my phone had run out of battery. =P Hopefully tomorrow my credit cards will still be intact after standing there for… quite a while.

Finally my day ended, I got home and have been playing around with a couple of my electronics projects with quite a bit of success! =)