More Science

[shermarama]

Newcastle is *cold*. Like, hardened locals have put the office heater on. I've lost my tolerance for cold from living in the poncy south for years; I'm wearing four layers of top today and have not at any point been too warm. It'll go up to five when I put my jacket on to go back to the flat. That won't be for a while yet because while we were getting the basics of the methods down yesterday, the rest of this week will be all about getting as many of these samples done as possible - four a day on each reaction is the aim, to get them all done, and given that the longer one takes about two and a quarter hours including equipment turnaround time, you can see that means long days. Everything is based around the fifteen minute sampling interval and the ten minutes of spare time between those intervals, which can get used for analysing results, setting something else up, eating food or chinwagging as appropriate. It's going to be a rather hermit-like week, but never mind. 

I'm getting occasional updates from Chris by text - he's on a train from Berlin to St. Petersburg for the next 36 hours, and apparently it's like the wall never fell in there.

Comments

[redcountess]

Henry Rollins did a thing about his journey on the Trans-Siberia Express at his previous London spoken word gig, and yeah, it's like there was no Glasnost.

gruelling schedules

[(Anonymous)]

I must have told you this before, but in my second-year hostel a very tall German scientist was the hostel-keeper, a kind of supervisory honorarium that meant you got money off your rent in return for making sure people got out if there was ever a fire, basically. His flat was right by the door so we noticed when in second term he started wandering round in a dressing gown at all hours. It turned out that this was because he was doing his main series of experiments, and the routine took a steady five hours to run. So he would get up, go to the lab and set something up, set the next one up while it ran, go and get food, unload and set up, fall over in the Graduate Parlour for four hours, go back, unload and set up, and every now and then come back home and sleep at whatever point seemed to make sense. By the end of the termm as things got more desperate, daylight and night-time had ceased to figure and he was running experiments all the time, so sleeping no more than four hours at a time and being very very wary when moving through narrow spaces or operating cooking apparatus. It can't have been fun.

But the next term he got together with a really hot African girl scientist and I figured he was getting at least as much paybacks as he deserved for his suffering then. I suppose we can hope it works like that for you too...

That Jon bloke

Re: gruelling schedules

[shermarama]

I shall keep an eye out for really hot Afrcan girl scientists, then. Not that that'll change anything much in the way of normal operation.