Meme-Free Zone

For a while now the Science Museum has been running an exhibit on Technicians, and I finally got round to seeing it today. I think it's aimed at school-kids with the aim of getting them interested in jobs in science other than being researchers. But to me, and I suspect to a lot of other people who have worked as technicians, the overwhelming impression of every exhibit was that it depicted a clean, tidy world where every bit of equipment needed was close at hand, clean, and exactly what was needed to get the world done, with clear uncluttered laboratories and workrooms with ample space for the work that's needed. In other words, a prettied-up world which only superficially resembled reality.

When I was a working educational lab technician I generally described my job as "the bludgeoning edge of science"; mostly repetitive, never state of the art, just something that had to be done to keep the cogs of science turning so that (hopefully) we would eventually churn out a scientist or two, or at least get the kids through their exams. Usually it involved a lot of trays piled high with not even slightly state of the art kit, bottles of chemicals with dodgy labelling and even dodgier contents, and endless washing up. By the time I retired the school had four technicians trying to cope with 240 hours of science a week in ten labs on two sites, nearly a thousand kids with very little interest in tidiness and lab safety, and a bunch of teachers who tried to keep things under control but could rarely keep an eye on everything going on in a crowded lab. Once I was gone they soon reduced it to three technicians, with so far as I know no reduction in the workload. Over the 42 years I did the job we had one technician and at least two teachers suffer nervous breakdowns and other psychological problems. And this was a school which on the whole had reasonably well-behaved kids...

My anecdotal knowledge of other technician-type jobs is that most of them seem to be similar - unless you're working in something really high-tech and big-budget, which is rarely the case, technicians spend a lot of their time just trying to keep things under control, and often doing repetitive parts of a process that passes through a lot of hands - the CSI / NCIS idea of a technician involved in every stage of an investigation comes to mind, because it simply doesn't happen - often DNA tests, mass spectroscopy etc. get farmed out to big commercial labs where there's someone who spends his whole life doing the same test over and over again.

Looking at the museum exhibits, I found myself really wishing that I'd had the good luck to find myself in one of those nice tidy labs. But the reality is that I probably would have got pretty bored - the up-side of the sort of chaos I worked with was that it was endlessly challenging and kept me on my toes. The down-side is that by the time I retired I had high blood pressure and other signs of stress, and breathed a huge sigh of relief that I was able to get out of it at 60 rather than hanging on for another five or ten years.

No moral here, except that I can't help thinking that anyone who decides to go into a career as a technician as a result of seeing this exhibit may be in for some disappointments. On the whole I'm really glad that it isn't my problem!

 This so belongs on an Analog cover!

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap170329.html

Having resisted the siren call of thermal imaging I decided to take a look at my other science posts, noticed this one from 2013:

http://ffutures.livejournal.com/1003932.html

describing the TI Sensortag, a cheap Bluetooth sensing device that might be interesting for school science etc. and comes with free software for Android and iPad / iPhone. I wondered what, if anything, had happened to the technology.

It turns out that what has happened is that they've apparently made it better. The processor is ten times faster, and there are more sensors. The original gizmo included an accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope, barometer, hygrometer, and infra-red thermometer. The new version has ambient light, digital microphone, magnetic sensor, humidity, pressure, accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, object temperature and ambient temperature. .

Since it works out at £24 quid including delivery and VAT I've decided to buy one to play with - not sure I really need it, but if not I'll sell it on. Ought to be here in the next day or two, I'll post when I've tried it out.

http://www.ti.com/ww/en/wireless_connectivity/sensortag2015/?INTC=SensorTag&HQS=sensortag

Article about the DSCOVR observation satellite now at the L1 position a million miles from Earth, including time-lapse video of the Earth and moon.

http://www.wired.com/2015/08/satellite-took-incredible-photo-almost-didnt-leave-earth/

A slight problem here in that dwellers on a small planet will not see what we see on Earth (although it obviously isn't our moon and sun); the odds against their world having a moon that covers the same angle as their sun are enormous! But fun anyway...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2015/clangers-eclipse

Interesting demonstration of what travelling at lightspeed would really mean, when compared to the size of the universe. It starts at the sun; due to time constraints it ends a little past Jupiter.

http://vimeo.com/117815404

Pointed out by ACS WINOLJ on the Twisting the Hellmouth forums.

Powerful rare earth magnets allow some interesting tricks - this one's a self-propelled "train" made of a battery and some magnets, running inside a copper coil. If I was working I'd probably want to try this, though I'm willing to bet it kills the batteries (which look like small camera batteries such as AAAA) fairly quickly.

A visit to the Yerkes observatory in 1897 - The Greatest Telescope on Earth by Walter George Bell.

http://forgottenfutures.com/library/telescope/telescope.htm

It's an interesting look at one of the last big refractor telescopes, but formatting HTML for measurements in weird fractions of an inch is a total pain!

Let me know if anything looks odd.

Gacked from sjgames

Japanese scientists have genetically engineered silk worms with coral or jellyfish genes to produce silk that glows in UV light - in three different colours:

http://io9.com/transgenic-silkworks-spin-glowing-fluorescent-silk-541389233

So long as you don't end up with silkworms that sting you I suppose it's OK...

Weird question - can anyone identify the manufacturer of this fire alarm sensor?



We have rather a lot of them in our labs since they were rebuilt, and we need to cover them with an appropriate red cap when we do anything that might trigger the alarms, which happens all too often. We have three or four caps, but there are two sites with ten labs plus prep rooms and store rooms, and a corridor outside four of the labs with seven of these detectors - the ceiling is split into several areas by beams crossing the corridor, and they have a sensor in each area. We could really use a lot more. The caps look like this:



Unfortunately I have no idea who made these - the number shown is its number on the alarm network, not a model number or anything, and I can't see a maker's name anywhere.

Anyone got any thoughts?

Later - manufacturer tentatively identified, I've contacted them re spares and hope they'll reply sooner or later. Thanks, everyone.