UV-Vis Lamps

September 21, 2007 at 10:58 am | | stupid technology

I’m still trying to figure out this one. The first trace is a transmission spectrum taken of a potentially suspect optic. A handful of scans later, the lamp burned out, and the second is that taken with the new lamp, same optic. Both in dual beam mode, with no additional background subtraction or zeroing.

Thankfully, the stupid check prevented me from drawing conclusions based on the original scan (you can’t have a lasing cavity with a Q=.05), although the shape matched almost exactly with the anomaly we were seeing. Weird, huh?

nerd tests

September 19, 2007 at 7:51 am | | nerd, stupid technology, wild web

You know that you’ve been studying photophysics too long when you keep trying to spell the state “Fluorida“!

So I took a nerd test. I think it’s broken: my score was way too high:

I am nerdier than 96% of all people. Are you a nerd? Click here to find out!

That just can’t be right. So I took the version 2.0 of the same test. (It wasn’t very Web2.0, by the way.)

NerdTests.com says I'm a Kinda Dorky Nerd King.  What are you?  Click here!

So that broke it down for me. Thanks. My lack of comic-book knowledge dropped my score in that category. I think my score was so high in the last category was because I said that I don’t mind the holes in my socks. But I don’t think that makes me awkward. I mean, I have a girlfriend. Shouldn’t that make my score way lower?

Rube Goldberg Science

July 13, 2007 at 8:27 am | | everyday science, grad life, stupid technology

Most people have probably heard of or seen pictures of so called Rube Goldberg Machines. These are extremely complicated apparatuses which do extremely simple tasks. Here is an example from the Rube Goldberg website.

rg_55.gif

This one could actually be useful for those grad students who have bosses that keep track of time in lab.

There are even Rube Goldberg Machine contests, in which teams try to design a machine that can use the greatest number of steps to complete a simple task.

Now, science is often complicated and it doesn’t need any extra help from us grad students to make it more complicated but I fell into the trap myself and let this be a warning to all those who think they have a really good idea… think again.

The required task is: Do a pump-probe anisotropy measurement using infrared light. Simple enough at face value, but all you visible spectroscopists out there must keep in mind that IR polarizers are ~1000 times worse than visible polarizers and there is no such thing as a broadband IR half wave plate. Tack onto that the fact that IR detectors are much less efficient that visible detectors and you’ve got a passel of stumbling blocks in front of you when you’re trying to do this experiment. I’ve tried a number of different techniques and because the IR polarizers and half wave plates are a little sketchy, transmission always seems to screw things up. So I thought to myself, what if we did everything using reflections! Then it would be achromatic and everything would be hunky dory. Here’s a schematic diagram of what the pump beam is subjected to in this scheme. The actual layout is much more complicated but I didn’t have a digital camera with me.

crazy-pump-probe-setup.gif

The periscope serves to change the polarization of the pump beam so that it will be parallel or perpendicular to the probe. The bottom mirror in this periscope is on a computer controlled rotation stage so that it can rotate to spit the beam out in two different directions depending on the polarization you want. In addition to that, since there are now two beam paths we added a computer controlled mirror that could flip in and out of the beam depending on which beam path you were using (which polarization). It was a thing of wonder to watch these things rotate and flip on the click of a mouse button, almost mesmerizing and utterly satisfying as well. Needless to say, it didn’t actually work for the purpose it was designed for. I wasn’t able to align the two beam paths well enough and/or the mechanical devices weren’t repeatable enough to consistently steer the beams in the same direction. Bummer. Like so many things that seem perfect on paper, real life imperfections rear their ugly head when you try to make it work in practice.

Now, this experiment isn’t a simple task by any stretch of the imagination, but making it more complicated is certainly not going to make it work better. It was only after I was humbled by the lack of repeatability of my fancy new system that I remembered Rube Goldberg and kicked myself for falling into his trap.

Magnetically Charged Goodness

May 31, 2007 at 11:00 pm | | science and the public, stupid technology

I was at my local Fairways Supermarket the other day looking for some shampoo when I came across this gem of an item:

magnetic
The label reads:

Magnetically charged hair care for naturally beautiful hair.

and the list of ingredients is:

Aqueous (Water) Extracts of *Rosemary (Rosmarinus Officinalis) Oil, *Coltsfoot Leaf (Tussilago Farfara), *Sage Leaf (Salvia Officinalis), *Clary (Salvia Sclarea), *Thyme (Thymus Vulgaris) Oil, *Soybean Protein (Glycine Soja), C12-14 Olefin Sulfonate (coconut derived), Cocomidopropyl Betaine, ** Magnetite (Fe3O4), Citric Acid (corn), Lactoferrin (Metalloprotein), Mica, Sodium Hydroxymethylglycinate, Sodium Chloride (sea salt), Grapefruit Seed.

I guess a little magnetite will go a long way. Do the good people at the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists know about this miraculous breakthrough in “naturally beautiful hair” technology?

Dirty Lab

March 28, 2007 at 12:27 am | | everyday science, hardware, stupid technology

I came across this picture while surfing Physorg (having an hour to kill after missing the last call Caltrain).

What jumps out at me is how insanely dirty the air is in that picture. It’s probably a good thing they’re just trying to push water around instead of doing any type of spectroscopy.

But that got me thinking about the way optical surfaces attract dirt like the ground attracts buttered toast (polarization smolarization, it’s Murphy’s law). In the spirit of making lemonade, I propose constructing an air purification system composed exclusively of optical elements. Obviously they’ll have to be configured into a running optical cavity (because the dust loves nothing more than finding that one critical spot to screw things up). The slight increase in price will easily be off-set by the 100+% efficiency. I say >100% because the system will coerce dust particles to materialize out of vacuum fluctuations, it’s that good. Call within the next 10 minutes with your credit card, and we’ll throw in this collectors edition Walnut cracker. Operators are standing by.

laser + coffee = blue?

March 27, 2007 at 10:28 am | | hardware, lab safety, stupid technology, wild web

This guy decided to heat his coffee using a very powerful laser. Stupid, right? Even more stupid, he filmed it and put it on the internets. That’s a good way to get fired. (I’m just jealous.)

[youtube OYvynmK0Slo laser coffee]

My question: How come the light is blue? The safety placard says it’s Nd:YAG (invisible IR 1064 nm) or HeNe (red 633 nm). Even doubled Nd:YAG should be green (532 nm). Strange.

Maybe things looks different at 2 kW.

(Thanks to Geekologie.)

dexter learns to walk

March 5, 2007 at 9:12 am | | news, stupid technology

The Anybots robot lab out here in Mountain View, CA got Dexter (their first dynamically balancing walking humanoid robot) to walk!

dexter_walking_robot.jpg

Kinda scary: AN UNPOKABLE ROBOT!!! Well, it’s better than poor Asimo falling down the stairs.

Actually, despite my mockery, I think this is wicked cool!

one-way mirror?

February 2, 2007 at 3:50 pm | | crazy figure contest, stupid technology, wild web

The Japanese National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) has developed a reversible mirror (source), which consists of two pieces of glass with a small spacing in between containing a thin film of magnesium-titanium alloy. Allegedly, the film turns transparent when hydrogen is pumped into the spacing; reflective when air/oxygen pumped in. The idea is to use the glass as windows for building and reduce cooling costs (by turning the windows reflective on sunny days). Interesting idea. (But….)

mirror-window.jpg

This story was picked up by several blogs/websites (PhysOrg, SciFiTech, Geekologie, UberGizmo), but I was disappointed that no one pointed out an obvious flaw in the above figure: in the “transparent” frame, they’ve added substantial backlighting. Of course the mirror is more transparent when you supply backlighting! The direction of illumination is different between the two frames and thus they aren’t comparable. This is way worse than changing the bin size.

OK, I’m sure the mirror effect is reversible in this system, and that the effect is dramatic. Just too bad that they had to fake the figure!

And BTW, do we really want hydrogen and oxygen pumped thoughout high-rise buildings, contained in fragile glass? It’ll give “raging inferno” a new name!

oh, you mean wheelbarrow!

January 30, 2007 at 9:01 am | | crazy figure contest, literature, stupid technology

Ok, another contender in the worst-figure contest:

wheelbarrow_molecule.gif

In case you didn’t know what a wheelbarrow was. No really, this is a real figure in the paper. (Hat-tip to MetaDatta. And Sujit thought that Tetrahedron Letters is a funny journal title, too. Back in undergrad, I thought it was a joke journal. Now I am a co-author on a paper in Tetrahedron, so don’t I look the fool.)

P.S. My favorite part of the figure is the triple equal mark.

the internets make you live longer

January 25, 2007 at 10:15 am | | crazy figure contest, science and the public, software, stupid technology, wild web

Proven: Using the internet makes you live longer. And, as a nice side effect, the internet reduces child mortality. Don’t believe me? See for yourself (click on the chart below):

internet_mortality.jpg

(To manipulate the chart or see a map or make your own chart, click here.) Cool Google stuff.

news update: photonics, publishing, and elephants

January 8, 2007 at 8:43 pm | | literature, news, science and the public, science community, stupid technology, wild web

Just a few (sciency) news updates today…

Publishing

This month, NPG launches its new (sub)journal Nature Photonics. It might have some cool articles in the future. Also PLoS One launched at the end of 2006 and will be an open-access journal that publishes any submissions that pass very limited scientific criteria (i.e. not including the impact or “coolness” of the paper). Who know? It might even work. If there were a good way of filtering the papers after they’re published, this open-access fad might be the new paradigm.

Invisible Cloak (not)

OK, everyone’s calling it an invisible cloak, but the “metamaterials” technology isn’t really even close. But it just got closer, with Opt. Lett. 2006, 32, 53–55. The authors report a metamaterial with a negative refractive index for visible (780-nm) light. And it’s really cool because … hey wait … where’d you go??

Stupid Elephant Picture

Many newspapers etc. have been publishing a picture of an elephant fetus in the womb (allegedly).

elephant_fetus.jpg

Cool eh? But it’s bogus! (Yeah, I was fooled, too. I saw it in Nature, where they claimed it was “enhanced with computer graphics.” Riiiiight. That should have tipped me off.) Actually, it is a silicon model of this ultrasound image:

elephant_fetus_real.jpg

I guess that’s cool.

offset your entropy footprint

January 2, 2007 at 10:31 am | | news, science and the public, science@home, stupid technology, wild web

You’ve probably heard of websites like CarbonCounter.com, where you can offset your personal carbon footprint to help prevent global warming. Well, I’ve created a site that will let you calculate and offset your entropy footprint in order to help prevent a more dangerous inevitability: the heat death of the universe!

Please help before it’s too late.

no internet and no wireless make sam something something

December 22, 2006 at 8:16 pm | | science@home, stupid technology, wild web

Go crazy? Don’t mind if I do!

I’m home in Maine visiting family (and friends) for the holidays. My parents, unfortunately, have … prepare yourself … DIAL-UP internet. In other words, there is no internet at my house. Which is partially why I haven’t written anything lately. (Another reason is that I’m lazy.)

So, in order to use (fast) internet, I go to local coffee shops and the town library. But after hours, I’ve found myself sitting in a cold car in the library parking lot—leeching off the wireless and desperately checking my email (all spam).

OK, I just wanted to make fun of myself. And perpetuate stereotypes about Maine.

saved google searches

December 10, 2006 at 1:13 pm | | software, stupid technology, wild web

Don’t you sometimes regret that the little search field in the upper right corner of a Firefox window (or the Google toolbar or … I dunno, does the new IE have a search field?) remembers the stupid things you type in? Is there a word for search-memory regret?

embarrasing.jpg

So embarrassing. Especially the misspelling. (By the way, do not search what I searched. Very disturbing.)

A better search history here.

better gloves

December 5, 2006 at 6:00 pm | | everyday science, hardware, lab safety, stupid technology

Man, my least favorite part about wearing nitrile gloves is that my palms get all sweaty. Gross. So I came up with a great way to avoid that discomfort:

bettergloves1.jpg

Isn’t that great. Much more comfortable. Now I can work for hours without changing my gloves, all the while feeling vented and fresh.

And then it hit me: why vent just the palm when you can vent the back of your hand, too? That’s when I came up with an even better idea:

bettergloves2.jpg

I should really patent these!

This idea was so successful that I went to work on my safety glasses. Did you know that if you remove those silly lenses, the safety glasses are much lighter? And I don’t think those lenses actually do anything, because I can see much better without them, now (they were all foggy from a bunch of solvents, acids, etc. splashing on them).

This post has been censored by your friendly lab-safety coordinator. We apologize for any inconvenience. –Sam

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