Typhoon 9

I'm back up at the lab in Tsukuba again, for the first time in a couple of months. We have the annual summer shutdown at the moment, so the accelerator and detector aren't moving. Instead everybody is busy organizing and participating in a variety of summer schools.

Firstly we had Belle Plus, a four day summer school for high school students. This was the second time we held this event, the first being around this time last year. Overall I think it went pretty well. All the students seemed to have a fairly good time and I think we managed to fix a few of the minor problems we had last year. Belle Plus was from Thursday to Sunday last week (8/30 ~ 9/2).

Secondly we have "Belle Sofware Festa" from Wednesday to Friday this week (9/5 ~ 9/7). This is basically an interactive tutorial aimed at students trying to learn how to use the Belle Software, although there are a handful of senior staff who are sitting in as well. I'm not sure if it's a good thing that the people in charge of running the experiment are sitting here asking questions about how to log onto the computers, but at least they're trying. Up until now we haven't really had a common complete set of documentation for the analysis procedure, which has made it hard for new students to get involved with analysis. This event is long overdue, and I'm sure the slides will come in handy for future students as well.

So, that's what I've been up to for the last week or so. There was a bit of excitement last night though as the first major typhoon for the year came through Tsukuba. The animation below, which I took from the IMOC Weather Page site shows the hourly rainfall in central Japan from 10AM yesterday (9/6) until 10AM today (you have to click to view on some browsers.) The peak rainfall were I am was about 30~40mm per hour at just before midnight last night, but it's still pouring down now. Hopefully it will have passed by the time I go home tomorrow.