End game

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 […]

A weekend experiment

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 […]

Amoeboid steps

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 […]

A new part and a new start

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 […]

Not quite any desk

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 […]

Mysterio-plasmic reticulum

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 quiet interlude

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 […]

A himmer of glope

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 […]

The pinhole test

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. […]