Tobias Baskin's sort-of real time science blog
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
March 31 is International Transgender Day of Visibility (Fig. 1). Please do something nice for your trans friends today (and everyday). As for the title of today’s post, maybe it is the other way around? Last week, I was shut out from tweaking the calibration of the liquid crystals (discussed here) because the software glitch […]
Pinholes and pinheads! Before getting to the latest installment of the Calibration Campaign, I want to remind everyone that I welcome questions and comments (unless you are a troll!). Happy to answer. Also do hit the subscribe button so you never miss a post; and please tell your friends! With that, on to the latest. […]
Last week, I wrote about my misgivings over the 5 degrees of separation (actually, of misalignment) between the rotatable polarizer’s positioning on the microscope stage and the polarization of the microscope’s laser. In discussing with Rudolf Oldenbourg (MBL), I learned that the misalignment does not matter. What does matter is that the peaks and valleys […]