One of my collaborators walked by me today, took one look and said, “Hopeless...”

He was referring to me after seeing the background on my laptop. Many people have meaningful pictures of loved ones, children or pets. Many people have photos from some place or event. Others have exotic graphics or pictures of beautiful imagined things. What do I have?

What is it and why am I hopeless?

The picture is a photo of an analog oscilloscope screen. The little green lines are pulses detected by an x-ray detector, one line per photon in a short period of time. When they overlap on the screen it can get quite bright. Anyhow, this is readily recognized in these parts (namely the Advanced Photon Source) as what an x-ray diffraction person uses to do experiments. Or at the very least, a tool to do the experiments. No one sits around and says, “that’s about 20% brighter... oh wait, 30% brighter... now dimmer.” It’s of course fed into a computer which records and counts them.