Tobias Baskin's sort-of real time science blog
I have about a month remaining on the board here. Today, rather than look forward to the trade-offs and pressures of the coming weeks, I’ll do the usual and look backward, telling the tale of the past week, which certainly included trade-offs and pressures. I was busy. For my plants, I think I have sorted […]
Please enjoy a slice of pineapple upside-down cake on my behalf (Fig. 1). I solved my calibration issues by inserting the liquid crystal slider upside down. For months, I have been washing up against the rocks of calibration. I need to calibrate the liquid crystal unit before I can measure anything on the confocal fluorescence […]
Today’s title isn’t as catchy as War and Peace despite the alliteration. Oh well. Thanks to our finding a stable power meter, Dean and I were able to calibrate the liquid crystals on the multiphoton microscope. We made a little sculpture surrounding the detector and the rotatable polarizer (Fig. 1). The detector of the power-meter is a […]
During the past week, I enjoyed a holiday. Laura and I were visited by our son, brin, and husband, Poe. Along with generally lolling around, we visited, among other places, Winterbourne Gardens, the Pen Museum, and Coventry cathedral. Streamed Dr Who. Good times all around. But yesterday (Saturday), I cycled into the lab to check […]
I have progressed since the previous post two weeks ago, but to label the progress baby steps would be to exaggerate. Two weeks have elapsed since that post because last Sunday (aka post day) I was in Glasgow. I had been invited to give a seminar by Mike Blatt at Glasgow University. Laura and I went up […]
Not a new start as much as a new vehicle: getting off the tram and onto the bus. Or to put it more accurately, getting out of the car with smoke spewing from the radiator and hopping on a bicycle. Will I make my destination? Dunno but at least I will be moving. At long […]
A silver lining of a frustrating week at work was that it spurred me to a prolonged jaunt yesterday (Saturday). I took a train to Kidderminster, avoided the lure of a sign to their carpet museum (with difficulty!), walked for ten minutes thru a fairly dilapidated town to a bus stop, sat at the one […]
No post last week because my wife Laura and I had spent the week before in Rome. I considered blogging about our sightseeing, we did visit the Botanical Gardens—well worth a tourist’s digression, but I felt that travel-gazing is not quite the spirit of Lab Fab. Also, I was flat-out tired: visiting Rome features kilometers and […]
A short post today. For one thing, I just spent an hour dealing with the reservation for Laura and my stay in Rome, Italy, being peremptorily cancelled. We are supposed to check in tomorrow. We got an email this afternoon from the quaint B&B “Livia” saying sorry you cannot stay with us, our toilet has […]
Welcome to the new look Lab Fab. Not my idea. Campus IT overlords decreed that Origin, the theme used by my blog, shall be discontinued. In blog-land, the “theme” means the set of design and layout elements that control what the blog looks like. Apparently, Origin is old (and hence insecure vis a vis hacking) and […]