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Still More of My (Lab) Space

This is prep for the laser experiment I will be running on Friday. The Carbopol 940 and water mixture can't have bubbles floating around or the system will be less likely to behave like the computer model we are attempting to confirm.

Much like pouring a beer, we must stream the fluid down the side.



This is a rhodamine injection that will be used in the experiment. Rhodamine powder, which emits light when exposed to a laser, was blended into a sample of the Carbopol and water mixture where it will act as a tracer allowing us to study some fluid dynamics. Those bubbles are immobile because the fluid is psuedo-plastic or shear thinning, like the bubbles in a bottle of hair gel.

Rhodamine is a suspected carcinogen, so it is important to keep this injection away from Cameron Diaz, who is liable to use it in her hair like she did with Ben Stiller's spunk that one time.

More of My (Lab) Space

Almost all the liquid-based lab cleaners appear to have taken their cue from box wine. The industrial strength floor stripper was probably the worst of these so far. Imagine a cardboard box that was eroding quite a bit leaving you with a wet, creepy, undead zombie of a cardboard box with its plastic-sac intestines flopping all over the place.

This glass and goggle cleaner is pretty cute, though. You hold the whole box and push the nozzle down to squirt. Easy! Er, Awkward! But, in a cute way!

My (Lab) Space

This is actually my desktop wallpaper at home now. Sometimes, when I am at work, I like to pretend that I'm in a (very air conditioned) Columbian cocaine lab.

Not always though. Just long enough to consider watching Scarface all the way through for once. (Did you know that Oliver Stone got addicted to coke as he was doing research for the screenplay? Thank God they're now letting him do a film about September 11th!)

I am at my Chemical Engineering Summer Internship ...

... and the Rheometer is still not working. Within the space of a few seconds, I was able to start this blog and complain about the problem, which is more like a symptom of the bureaucracy problem here at this school.

Welcome to the inaugural post of my blog: a trite and pointless complaint whose banality will hopefully diffuse beneath the torrent of relevant and entertaining posts to follow. [oh, LOL.]