The BaBar Calorimeter Light Pulser System

To make precision measurements with a CsI(Tl) calorimeter in a high luminosity environment requires that the crystals are well calibrated and continually monitored for radiation damage. This should not effect the total integrated luminosity which is particularly important for the \babar calorimeter to enable it to make CP violation measurements in the $B$ meson system. To achieve this goal a fibre-optic light pulser system was designed using xenon flash lamps as the light source. A novel light distribution method was developed using an array of graded index microlenses. Some initial results from performance studies are presented.Comment: 4 pages: 1 LaTeX file + 4 EPS figues + 1 style file + 1 EPS logo. Talk given at "8th Pisa meeting on Advanced Detectors" (Elba, May 2000

Young Tom Wharton

This working paper is a draft of the first three chapters of a biography of Thomas, 5th Baron, 1st Earl, and 1st Marquess of Wharton (1648-1715). It traces the development of young Thomas (Tom to his family and eventually to the political world of England) from his birth until his return from France in 1666. The reader may be relieved to know that the formidable array of genealogical notes in Chapter I will eventually be reduced into an appendix on the Wharton family and that the table of abbreviations covers the whole book, not merely the first three chapters. Some of the notes, it should be added, are made necessary by the vast amount of misinformation that has accreted around the Whartons. Nice people will not bother to read them

Marriage a la mode

Marriage a la Mode is the fourth chapter in the biography of Thomas, Marquess of Wharton (Tom to his family and eventually to the political world of England). The chapter picks up the narrative about 1666, when young Tom returns from three years in France; and it deals with the attempts of Lord Wharton, his father, to negotiate a suitable seventeenth-century style marriage for him. Though the episodes deal with the Wharton family in particular, they illustrates some of the general problems of aristocratic marriages during the Restoration era; and they form a complete story in themselves. The tables of abbreviations and short titles which are included to help the reader through the (voluminous) notes are the lists for the whole biography, not merely Marriage a la Mode.</p