I'm just really into assigning peaks

At work I use mass spectrometers to acquire lots of spectra and then use software, which tends to have a very science-software style of user interface, to analyze it. There’s lots of graphs! With lots of peaks! Which can be interpreted to tell us stuff about molecules.

Apparently, I have a new hobby of acquiring gamma spectra of items in my collection of radioactive things (of course I have a collection of radioactive things) and using very science-software type software to plot it and then try to assign peaks in order to see stuff about nuclei in the samples. You know, to get away from work things, relax, unwind. Apparently, I’m just really into assigning peaks. At work the only property of the nuclei I care about is their masses, playing to the strength of a mass spectrometer. It’s only stable ones we want to deal with. (There is an extremely low level of enthusiasm for radioactively contaminating a mass spectrometer, but we can label samples with stable isotopes and then use the mass spectrometer to resolve them.) Decay chains are a whole new thing to me. Plus when you’ve got nuclei decaying and gamma rays shooting around a bunch of physics things happen producing an exciting array of artifacts in the data to consider.

This is the analytical instrumentation version of the computer-toucher thing where you all spend your days locked in struggle with Kubernetes and then come home to relax by reconfiguring your NixOS or whatever.