Tobias Baskin's sort-of real time science blog
A short post today because I spent last week teaching and holidaymaking. On the first three days of the week, I gave a workshop on writing clearly, Increasing the signal, decreasing the noise, to a dozen (well two didn’t show) post-graduate students. Four ! lectures on Monday (with coffee and biscuits and lunch strewn among them), homework […]
On four days last week, here is my day. I get to the lab a little after 8 AM. I unshroud the microscope, flick on the infrared light, and arrange bits and pieces on the lab bench, an operation that includes filling three small dishes with 3 mL of 1% congo red and making sure […]
I am living the cliché: it comes together at the very end. I hope that I don’t come apart. On Monday I caught up on a few things because the roots were too short. When the plate with seedlings is placed on the horizontal microscope, I can move the stage down only so far. With […]
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 […]