Tags: geekery

MLP - Twilight Scientist, Science - Twilight

Life, the Universe, and Everything

42

So tired. I was about ready to fall asleep at the fume hood. I had to be up early for a doctor's appointment this morning, and it's thrown my sleep schedule out of whack. But I now have a primary care provider in Sheboygan, and some much needed prescription refills, so all is good. And the doc is all kinds of awesome. We had one of those weird six degrees of separation moments - he used to work with Campus Crusade with a guy involved in the program my parents coordinate who just happened to be in Moscow when I was home for Christmas one year. That's actually how I found Dr. Corrigan's practice. Also in the category of awesome medical stuff, CFC-free inhalers are Teh Win. They work better, they're better for patients and the environment, and they don't taste gross. Yay! Mildly ironic that I had occasion to figure this out within hours of filling the prescription...

Had a staff meeting today at work, those are always fun. We've got a rather goofy group of lab geeks. And the production lab minion who I ranted about a couple of weeks ago (the one who brought us an urgent sample with no notice) is likely to be getting in trouble, if we can find out which one she is. Bringing over urgents with no notice is one thing, bitching at us for things beyond our control is quite another - Tami is NOT personably responsible for the fact that there was no one available to clear the data. Neither is anyone else, for that matter. It happens, we live with it and move on. And there's a reason we didn't respond to her page - we've been telling Maintenance for months that we can't hear pages in the labs. Someone needs to lose their entitlement complex, before we sick Bob on her. No one snarks quite like Bob, and I fangirl him for it. Also brought up my two current pet peeves in the lab. One, I do not leave chemical bottles all over my coworkers' desks; I would appreciate their not leaving them all over mine. Admittedly, my desk is directly below the counter where said chemicals are stored, but it's not really any harder to put them in the cabinet than it is to leave them on the counter, and that's safer, less messy, and not in my way. The other one is actually a fairly major safety issue. There are two hot plates in the RESE hood that almost never get used, and they're older ones, so they don't have indicator lights to tell you they're on. Well, someone was using one last Friday, and didn't turn it off, and I just about put my hand down on it when I went to shut the lab down for the weekend. That would NOT have been cool, pun not intended. I think I know who's responsible for both of those (same person), but I'm not naming names. He's also the one with the blasting heavy metal that sets off my autism and makes me go TWITCH! That also got mentioned at the staff meeting, so hopefully that will solve itself - I'd been delaying talking to the guy about it, since he's actually very nice, and I don't want to hurt his feelings.

Someone needs to have a word with Pro 1 - they brought over paperwork for an urgent, but didn't bring a sample. I don't usually handle Pro 1 stuff, but this stuff just needed an appearance, so I said I'd take care of it. After checking with a co-worker to be sure I wasn't blind and there really was no sample, I went and found Teh Boss. Dawn agreed that there shouldn't be paperwork with no sample. Everything that comes through QC gets an appearance at the very least, so it all has to go through the lab. And the guy in charge of Pro 1 wasn't answering Dawn's page. Sample finally came in several hours later and I went ahead and ran it. Had to pull out the respirator and uber-gloves for that one, carbodiimide is not a friendly chemical - to the tune of "may cause blindness, strong sensitizer, readily absorbed through the skin, respiratory hazard, can be fatal in small doses." I'm sure I'm forgetting a few, but that's the gist. So, yeah - not very nice. Let's hear it for PPE.
MLP - Twilight Scientist, Science - Twilight

Whoot!

So the instruction manual that came with my DVD player says it won't play DVDs without a region lock. Now I have a few DVDs that I bought on the streets of Moscow at Izmailova. This means that they're all rated ARRRRRRR! for "you better believe that's pirated." This includes my LotR DVDs. But after I finished watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail I REALLY wanted to watch Fellowship of the Ring, so I put it in just on a whim - it's WORKING! Either the manual lied, or whoever ripped it left the region lock on it/managed to hack code it for all regions. Rock on! Still wanna get legal copies, though, I have a thing for bonus features...
MLP - Twilight Scientist, Science - Twilight

Tales from the Lab: All your base are belong to us!

Random ramblings from work:

So, I work in a lab. Interesting things often happen in labs, that's just how labs are. For instance, we came back from Thanksgiving break to a minor disaster. That Friday, Maintenance had cut the house nitrogen lines on site for some minor repairs. This should be fine, it's not like anyone was there to be using the nitrogen lines, afterall, right? Except, one of the water/ethylene glycol tanks that heats our building is kept under nitrogen pressure. Well, actually, they're all kept under nitrogen pressure. But this one didn't have a check valve. So when it lost pressure, its contents backed up into the nitrogen lines that were meant to pressurize it. Which is how one of our weekend workers, Kim, came in on Saturday to find the labs flooded six inches deep in a mixture of water and antifreeze from every nitrogen tap that had been left onover the weekend. We spent Monday mopping and running tubing so we could run water,and then nitrogen through the lines to clean them out. It sucked. Numerous things were contaminated. And the IR had ambitions to be an aquarium. You see, it has a nitrogen purge to help protect it from caustic samples. When it was given a water/antifreeze purge instead, it flooded, and was dead beyond our ability to ressurect. Those of you on the Lib, yes, this is where T'Selara's little incident with the water tank came from. What, you thought I made that up?

Of course, most of our adventures aren't nearly so dramatic. One of the funniest lab moments ever occurred durring pass-off, when the shift coming on and the shift coming off meet to discuss samples that need to be handed off and general lab information. Tracy needed to etch an ID number on a glass syringe, and thus was looking for the diamond point pen. So she wrote a note on the white board 'Does anyone know where the diamond point pen is?' Unfortunately, she was writing at a weird angle, and didn't put enough space between 'pen' and 'is' - we were all laughing like loons.

Now to the ramblings of this week...

So on Tuesday I had a tracker (paperwork for a chemical in the lab for testing) that wanted an FACD, which stands for free acid. You titrate it, and then calculate the % acid. No big deal. Of course, to titrate an acid, you need a base. Most FACD/TACD (just a calculation difference, same procedure) titrations use 0.01 normal sodium hydroxide in water, or NaOH in GeekSpeak, as the base. This chemical, however, likes 0.01 normal potassium hydroxide in methanol, or KOH in MeOH. The TACD buret we keep pre-filled contains 0.01nNaOH. So, I went digging around in the reagent cabinets for some alcoholic KOH - I knew I'd seen some. But every lab is infested by lab gremlins - little invisible evil-doers who like to cause trouble for chemists. Breking glassware, spilling chemicals, jinxing computers and the like. I am certain they were behind the glycol incident described above. But this week they decided all your base are belong to us. I found numerous normalities of NaOH. I even found several bottles of 0.5n alcoholic KOH. But 0.5n was useless to me. I needed either 0.01n or a 0.1n volumetric standard so I could make my own 0.01n. Now, as it happens, the company I work for makes and sells a 0.1n volumetric standard KOH in MeOH. But our lab doesn't stock it, because we don't use it much. So I ended up getting some KOH pellets, making a volumetric standard, standardizing it, and using that to make my 0.01n titrant. Now, the reason I blame the lab gremlins for this is because last night, I was looking for something completely different, and in a cabinet I and several other people had checked multiple times...I found a liter of 0.01n KOH in MeOH. Darn gremlins...

Now last night, we were running low on solvent trackers, so aside from a few titrations, I was looking at a lovely evening of lab chores. Normally I work in the devo lab, but I needed the auto-titrators, so I was with a couple of coworkers in micro. And somebody set up us the bomb. A lab minion from one of the production departments comes over to QC, asking who's in charge. This usually means that someone has a 24 urgent (oh dear, our underwear seems to be in a knot) tracker for us. Now, any dork can send us a 5 day normal (run this, please) tracker or a 3 day high (get a move on, if you don't mind) tracker. But there are RULES about urgents. As in, you must give us four hours notice that you're bringing over an urgent, or we will hate you. When Bob checked his email, he found that we'd been given 10 minutes notice. Oops. Now in this case, the only reason they wanted it run as an urgent is because Harry, the weekend dude this weekend, won't be able to clear the data. Thing is, the clearing chemist (data reviewer) on our shift worked a split shift yesterday, so she was already gone. It wasn't gonna clear til Monday anyway. This led to swearing and grousing from Bob and Tami. Understandably. I finished my titrations and spent the rest of my evening cleaning out the solvents cabinet and exterminating the Killer Dustbunnies of Doom.

In non-lab news, life continues a pace. I've done some real cooking. Go me. Though I'm kinda craving taco bell tonight... The cat is being his usual adorable self. And I need to do laundry. Business as usual.

This post brought to you by the lab gremlins, bad 80s video games, and the letter Y.
MLP - Twilight Scientist, Science - Twilight

Swiped from proanon, pegasus_99, and p_a_morningstar, among others

What Fantasy Archetype Are you?



The Unlikely Hero
You are the Unlikely Hero! Others like you are Frodo (Lord of The Rings), Young Aurthur (arthurian Legend), Luke Skywalker (Star Wars), Peter/Susan/Edmund/Lucy (Narnia), Richard Mayhew (Neverwhere), Harry Potter (Harry Potter) and Richard Cypher (Wizard's first Rule). You were happy to just live out your life as a peaceful schoolboy/farmer/wood's guide. But alas, greatness was thrust upon you. Don't let the hordes of The Totally Wicked Villain get you down, you have your Seasoned Veteran Friend to protect you and you almost always end up with the Pillar-of-Strength Love interest. Heed you Mentor well and keep your chin up, hero! You are simple, humble and kind but possess great potential for truly inspirational heroism, bravery and strength in dark times.
Take The Quiz Now!Quizzes by myYearbook.com
MLP - Twilight Scientist, Science - Twilight

Pi day!

Happy Pi Day, everyone!

Image hosting by Photobucket

May all your circles have a circumference of 3.14 times the diameter and an area of 22/7 times the square of the radius!


What is it if you take a pumpkin and divide the circumference by the diameter?
Pumpkin Pi

What is it if you bake 3.14 apples in a pan?
Apple Pi

What is it called if you bake all your pies in a 9x9 cake pan?
Pi are square.
MLP - Twilight Scientist, Science - Twilight

My way, or the Pi-way

Lovely day of Compsiness today. One of the researchers our group has been studying was on campus today. He sat in on our class and spoke at Seminar, then we all went out to dinner. The subject of this particular post comes from today's seminar. Dan was explaining how molecules pack in thin films--most cyclic molecules with conjugated pi-systems pack edge to face, so that the dipole- positive hydrogens of one interact with the negative pi-cloud of the next. But, if you grow a crystal from ferrocene (central iron atoms give it an Aura of PositivenessTM) and benzene (all shall fear its negative Pi-Cloud of DOOMTM), it stacks face to face, creating a super pi-way.

Bad ASCII illustrations:
Edge-to-Face Stacking:
-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|
|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-
-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|
Face-to-Face Stacking:
||||||||||||||||
||||||||||||||||
||||||||||||||||

And, since Dan happens to be a Carl, there was also much reminiscing areound the dinner table. And stuff makes more sense now. Yay sense.
MLP - Twilight Scientist, Science - Twilight

All shall fear my triple-post of DOOM!

Meme sheep goes "baaaa."

You Are Dr. Bunsen Honeydew

You take the title "mad scientist" to the extreme -with very scary things coming out of your lab.
And you've invented some pretty cool things, from a banana sharpener to a robot politician.
But while you're busy turning gold into cottage cheese, you need to watch out for poor little Beaker!
"Oh, that's very naughty, Beaker! Now you eat these paper clips this minute."


Your results:
You are Geordi LaForge
Geordi LaForge
80%
Beverly Crusher
80%
An Expendable Character (Redshirt)
50%
Jean-Luc Picard
50%
James T. Kirk (Captain)
50%
Leonard McCoy (Bones)
50%
Uhura
45%
Mr. Scott
40%
Deanna Troi
35%
Data
35%
Spock
32%
Will Riker
30%
Mr. Sulu
30%
Chekov
25%
Worf
10%
You work well with others and often
fix problems quickly. Your romantic
relationships are often bungled.
Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Test
MLP - Twilight Scientist, Science - Twilight

geekery-chemistry vanity license plates

Cookies to anyone who can figure out these chemistry license plates:

1. HIHOAG
2. PANDANH4
3. FE2O3Y
4. FEMAN
5. AUDGR


Swiped without shame from our departmental newsletter, The Weekly Beaker


*Note to anyone who's confused--In the states, if you're willing to pay the extra ten bucks in registration fees, you can get your licence plate to say what ever you want within 8 characters (and probably some rules about no obscenities)

**Stuck? Find a periodic table:-)