Swans on Tea

I was waylaid by dust bunnies yesterday. It started in the lab; I was exposing the fresh layer of sticky mats as I usually do, and noticed that the air disturbance (quite a flourish if you want to get the sheet up in one motion) had sent some dust bunnies scurrying. I tracked [...]

I’ve mentioned before that I’m bigger than a breadbox. But that description will have to change. It’s not that I’m appreciably smaller (though I have lost some mass from running a net energy deficit the last several lunar cycles), it’s that I now have a much geekier description to use.
A colleague has been [...]

A colleague’s computer crashed, and he’s having the IT department wipe and reinstall the operating system and the software on it. But the Microsoft Office suite is old (2002), and they want the recent package … but not too recent. They’ve standardized on Office 2003 but are about to move to Office 2007, [...]

My glasses fell apart while I was attempting to clean them. The little tiny screw fell out, so the lens was no longer in a captive state, and the carpet in my office is not designed to make nanoscrews stand out to the casual (or even interested) observer, especially if you can’t wear your [...]

10 Awesome Summer Internships for Science Students
The National Science Foundation sponsors hundreds of summer programs, which allow sophomores and juniors to get their first taste of real labwork. Most of them last ten weeks and pay more than 3,000 dollars to cover your living expenses.
NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) search page
Opportunities are not just [...]

I was performing “some assembly required” of equipment in the lab recently, and got stuck when I couldn’t find the proper tool. There is only one such tool in the lab — an allen key of a particular size — and it wasn’t in the tool chest, which is not unusual. Tools are [...]

Check out Allyson’s guest post at Cocktail Party Physics for one of the main reasons for my recent observation
I didn’t see any glitches except for one or two instances of technical difficulties, which speaks volumes for the organizers and support staff, because you just know there were issues, and since they didn’t become visible it [...]

Breaking News: I wore a suit at work on Friday. I don’t think I had even worn a tie to work since leaving the navy. (I think most people who work in similar lab situations would agree that fancy clothes tend to interfere with real work getting done.) The party [...]

Things have been rather hectic lately. On top of the normal (and abnormal) bureaucratic stuff, there was a little matter of moving our clocks to their new home in another building. The capacity for disaster was simply terrifying, because this represented several Simoleons worth of equipment, and scientist-years of effort. Breaking a [...]

The other morning I made sure to tell a colleague about Whiteboard Tower Defense, a potentially addictive flash game. The colleague is giving a talk next week and in the finest tradition of physics research, had barely started to assemble his powerpoint slides and was starting to stress a little. So a time-wasting [...]

One of the questions one asks when trapping atoms in a magneto-optic trap (MOT) is “What shall we do with the atoms?” You often have an idea before you do the trapping — it’s not like we’re trophy hunters, trapping just to have something on the wall. Trapping in and of itself hasn’t [...]

I was wiring up some stuff in the lab, and wondered what color-coding we had used for that component on the prototype.
“It’s red” was the almost immediate reply.

Duh. I had expunged this from the buffer. They’re almost all red. That’s why we went with color coding — so much easier than labels.