With so many people having been removed from my previous work place there was a strange freedom to everything I did. Â If I needed a stapler I could just grab it from the cube of someone who had been dismissed. Â If I had a question or a concern, most of the people I could ask were too busy to reasonably answer it so I simply went with my gut and checked back when I had an answer even if I had wasted a chemical or material.
I haven’t had that kind of freedom since I was an intern. Â I missed it. Â That was back when science as a career was still in the cards. Â After eight hours or so cowboy science I had to fill out a lab report to describe what I had done. Â Immediately I remembered why science as a career was no longer in the cards.
One of our products at work is designed to be taken rectally but only after a healthy slathering of lubricant has been applied. The videos of that product in action in a faux-butt required several takes and I went through almost a pound of lube. By my calculations, that’d be enough to get a 200 person key party going. Finally, something that brings together my analytical background and my failure at dating.
Guessing at Christmas presents is somewhat alien to the Robinson’s. We provide lists from which one chooses an item for another party. Just guessing seems odd and barbaric akin to going to a restaurant and just guessing what the chef could prepare based on knowing it was a Greek restaurant. I have found this is not how most people work and after asking a friend she replied “sunshine and rainbows”. So, I purchased her a flash light and a prism. While I was as it, I got myself a prism too having never messed with one.
Today the prism came and I took it out of the box, set it on the table and learned I have no idea how a prism works on any practical level. I held it up to various lights with little effect and then held it up to various other focusing devices also with no effect. I drew a little diagram of the prism a la dark side of the moon and realized I needed a beam of light. I cobbled together a baffle from cardboard pieces and made a ghetto rainbow in our heater closet using the door and the lights from the rec room as my beam generator. I have mastered optics circa 1600.
On a more victorious note, someone I sent cracker jacks to got them and responded with this:
Shipping out cookies in weights of greater than 13 oz is a bit more expensive than one would wish. Priority mail becomes the best shipping option and generally this will cost between $7.00 and $10.00 for any sort of goodly sized box. But if one can successfully pack cookies in an envelope which are shipped at a flat rate of $4.95, things suddenly become much more economical. There is a phenomenon whereby vacuum packed materials become much more firm and resistant to breakage, especially if granular, and this phenomenon was exploited to great success by roboticists earlier this year to create a universal gripper hand:
So, why not try this with cookies? I bought a vacuum sealer and got to work making cookies. I vacuum sealed a dozen cookies and pit it against a control group of a dozen cookies in a Zip-Lock freezer bag. The vacuum cookies won hands down in the drop test where I dropped the bags from a height of about six feet showing no breakage or deformation. The vacuum sealed cookies also won in the crush test where I put them under a stack of books. The one case where the Zip-Lock cookies won was in what I call “initial deformation”, the force of the atmosphere is enough to bend a cookie easily if there’s a hint of gooeyness left in the cookie. As I want my cookies to still be soft, the work around I came up with was freezing the cookies first. When I failed to do this, and left the cookies in a windowsill, the vacuum package exhibited a behavior I now call “monocookie”.
I’m happy with the increased resiliency of cookies when vacuum-packed and envelope-mailed but I doubt I’ll ever use this process for things that are even a hint of sticky. If you get molasses cookies from me in a vacuum pack I probably hate you.
My father and I were sitting at our kitchen table, Max was laying on the floor.
Me: Have you noticed that Max doesn’t seem to do that thing where if you rub a dog’s belly, one of the legs starts going?
Dad: Of course he does.
*rubs standard dog-leg-whirl spot
Me: Don’t think he does.
Dad: Don’t worry, I’ll find it.
*minute of scratching Max’s belly*
Dad: Hm..
*few more minutes of scratching Max’s belly*
After five minutes of varied rubbing and scratching, Max’s leg didn’t move but I think Max was fine with us trying.
Chris: What’s that on the ceiling?
Me: A brown marmorated stinkbug.
Chris: We should deal with it *goes to cabinet, grabs hand full of rubber bands*
In short succession, six people with baccalaureate degrees in some sort of science were shooting rubber bands at the ceiling. After about 5 minutes of firing, I cheated and knocked it off the ceiling with a metal rod and discovered it was not a live stinkbug, but a dried dead husk of one. I guess that it explains why it didn’t try to dodge.
I made the error of saying I’d have an experiment done before the next day, forgetting that the process took six hours… and I’d have to run it twice, so I didn’t go home Tuesday night. The experiment involves testing materials against a battery of dyed mock digestive fluids. At about 2 AM I finished the experiments and was disposing of the excess in a large pressure-sealed drum and saw the added material start to foam. I later went to add more and at the first touch of the lid-lift mechanism, the stored contents blew through the narrow opening and shot a streak of foam composed of green food coloring and fake digestive juices across the front of my lab coat.  I was baffled as how the contents could have possibly done this but everything turned out ok. My clothing beneath the lab coat was untouched and I now had a green article of clothing for the holiday.
The results of the first test under the fake colon waste method didn’t come out as expected so I met with the requester to figure out what the cause was.
Him: There were two sources of error, first, I think you applied the product incorrectly.
Me: Really? I’ve done it this way for every previous running of the test.
Him: The method says use a round base rather than a square base that you used.
Me: But you said that was fine.
Him: Well, it wasn’t, do it again with round bases.
Me: You said there were two sources, what was the other?
Him: The recipe I gave you was off for a couple ingredients.
Me: How off?
Him: Somewhere between a factor of nine and a factor of 11.
Me: So, the recipe you gave me was off by an order of magnitude but you still think it was the shape of the base?
Him: Yeah, pretty sure.
Only one test method I’ve learned required signing legal documentation. The mixture for this particular method is the colonic equivalent of the recipe for Coke syrup and the entire time I’ve done this mixture I’ve treated it with a deference bordering on the sacred. Today I was running through the blending process when I found what appeared to be an error in mixing. I approached the creator:
Me: What the tolerance on the mixing of the 3rd ingredient set, I think your calculation is off by 2%?
Him: I don’t know. Anything within a factor of two should be fine.
Me: A factor of two? Like 200%?
Him: Yeah, this isn’t a precise thing.
Me: Your shitting me, I’ve been trying to squeeze measurements out to thousandths of a gram.
Him: Why?
Me: Because that’s what the method said. Didn’t you write this?
Him: No, a technician did a while ago.
Me: What happened to him?
Him: I fired him; he was way too uptight.
Pat Toye, Clara Rimmer, Joe Naylor and I took a spur-of-the-moment trip to the Body Worlds exhibit at the Franklin Institute and after talking about whether rain would increase or decrease visitor count with the line attendant we went in. Notes:
The theme was “Body Worlds 2 & the Brain”. I went into the exhibit with the idea that the brain was a visually uninteresting gray lump that constituted a dog’s breakfast. I left with the impression that the brain was a visually uninteresting gray lump that constituted a dog’s breakfast.
The attach points of the various pieces of the male package are not where one expects; if the ones for the testes were any higher they’d be strung from the nipples.
Nobody looks fat after their skin has been flayed.
Never go to an anatomical exhibit with two medical enthusiasts without putting at least 4 dollars in quarters in the meter. The estimated 27 minute difference between Joe’s museuming rate and Pat/Clara’s museuming rate cost me $36.00 in parking tickets.
Every animal looks badass when everything but their vascular structure is dissolved.
One can fake being anatomically competent by taking any term for a body part and adding one of the following: majoris, minoris, superior, inferior, anterior, or posterior. This was proven by the woman who nodded approvingly as I referred to the vulva as the “hoo-ha minoris” and the gut above the point that dangles over the belt in fat people as the anterior superior dunlop.
When one dies, the eyebrows remain until the end of time.  Or at least that’s the impression I got as we went about and everyone had no skin but still had eyebrows (IT WAS WEIRD).
Due to the exhibit “The Exploded Man”, I can now accurately imagine what it’d look like to take a slow motion video cap of someone eating a hand grenade.
The end of the exhibit featured a donor statement that brought tears to my eyes. The only other time I’ve been moved like that in Philadelphia was during the opening of the Constitution center. I wonder what it mean that I get emotional around liberty and utility but rarely at funerals.
