Frazz by Jef Mallett for May 10, 2014

In just a few short years brainy Caufield can get into the nuclear physics program at MSU and then they’ll let him play with their cyclotron.

They might not let him in the room unsupervised, but if he contacted the people who actually use the cyclotron ([i]not[/i] the university administration), he could almost certainly arrange a tour of the lab, and probably even watch it in operation. Nerds like showing off as much as anyone else.

You are already a taxpayer.

The entertainment value of cyclotrons is over rated and anything you make will kill you by radiation poisoning.The chemistry lab is uncooperative because everyone tries to make rocket propellant, explosives or drugs. You want to take a video camera, balloons, and explosives over to the laser lab. They’ll help.

When I was in high school one of our math teachers quit to become a maintenance technician at the Berkeley cyclotron. He gave a tour of the facility to a small group of us who were interested in nuclear physics. We weren’t in elementary school, but Caulfield is an unusual kid.

Actually Frazz is set in Ann Arbor Michigan so Caulfield was probably trying to use the cyclotron at the University Of Michigan. It would be much harder for him to try and borrow the cyclotron at Michigan State since it’s in Lansing Michigan and he wouldn’t really have a way to get there.

I used to have a job at a university department. One of my duties was to answer the main dept number, a holdover from my student hourly days. The crazy calls I would get were just astounding. The guy on welfare who wanted to take a PhD exam so he could take his slumlord to court over the mold in his apartment. He swore he new the science, but couldn’t tell me the difference between a eukaryote and a prokaryote. The old woman with dementia who kept calling on the status of her application to grad school. Apparently she applied in the 60’s and was rejected; but never gave up on the dream, and she kept re-applying every couple of years since then. The public school teachers (plural) who would call up looking to borrow or have equipment that costs hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Precocious children looking to intern in the labs. “Your parents know there are labor laws right?” People with mental illness who wanted to pay for tissue sample testing to prove to doctors that there were bugs crawling under their skin. They almost all had the “but I’m a taxpayer” mentality. “Listen bub, despite what you may think, unless your tax bill is above a million dollars every year, you aren’t paying for squat around here.”

You can see how this is still 1/3 triathlon related :D