depressed grad students
April 22, 2007 at 10:05 pm | sam | blogs, grad lifeHmmm. A few depressed grad students out there. Kyle feels in a funk. Excimer is bummed about an NSF rejection, and most of us know that pain. Excimer also thinks April is the most depressing month. Maybe. Propter Doc gives some advice to us all.
I’ve been feeling in a funk for the last week at least. Nothing in particular is wrong, just a lot to do and I don’t end up feeling productive at the end of the day. But it feels nice to hear that others are in the same mood. So y’all keep your chins up!
aqueous gel sample prep
April 18, 2007 at 4:46 pm | sam | everyday science, science communityDoes anyone have any experience making samples (preferably thin-film, ~100 nm) using agarose, gelatin, or some other transparent aqueous gel/biopolymer? For my poly(methyl methacrylate) samples, I spin-coat at 2500 RPM for 30 s and get a ~30-nm film. I can experiment with conditions, but I thought I’d ask first.
I’m trying to measure fluorescence from a relatively concentrated sample (~10-6 M fluorophore in biogel) on a glass coverslip using epi-illumination.
If I get any answers, I’ll let you know here.
sat-hexagon-urn
April 13, 2007 at 3:22 pm | sam | newsThis isn’t chemistry, but isn’t this pattern at the pole of saturn wicked cool?
Watch the movie by clicking the image above. The source is NASA. We’re all going to die.
They didn’t study…
April 12, 2007 at 9:16 am | Charles | blogshttp://www.scribd.com/doc/5107/They-didnt-study
NoChromix Volcano
April 11, 2007 at 8:47 am | kendall | cool results, everyday scienceA new twist on an old favourite. To make the NoChromix volcano, add one package of NoChromix® to your favourite H2SO4 and stir. Insert a cherished piece of glassware contaminated with whatever the hell pissed off the bath, slam the sash, and enjoy!
(I know what you’re thinking, but I scrubbed the hell out of those filters, rinsed them with nitric, then triple rinsed them with H2O before putting them in the bath).
blog roundup for march/april
April 10, 2007 at 7:59 pm | sam | blogs, newsSo I haven’t been perfect at this blog-roundup thing, but here’s another:
- Biocurious’ molecule of the month: Clathrin (for April) and zinc-fingers (for March)
- Kyle at The Chem Blog let’s us know how to grow crystals
- Propter Doc has a nice survival guide for working in lab (I like #4)
- Sujit at MetaDatta has nice summaries of some talks he enjoyed
- Paul at ChemBark has some interesting posts
- understanding some strange actions of ordinary food products
- what he would change if editor of JACS
- and now he has ChemBark magnets (we have magnets, too!)
- Andre at Biocurious shows the popular cell movie, now with words
- I really don’t like this movie, because it portrays the mechanisms of the cell as deterministic and driven, not random. It actually loses the true beauty of cellular mechanisms! (Actually, Andre seemed to have similar thoughts when he first posted this video.)
Until next time, enjoy the other blogs!
blogbirthday
April 9, 2007 at 5:11 pm | sam | blogs, news, open threadI just realized that we all missed this blog’s birthday: March 23, 2007. We’re over a year old! Any suggestions of what to change for the coming year (if we make it that long)? I was thinking of starting an Ask EDS category, where people can ask us p-chem or how-the-world-works questions and we can try to answer them. Maybe…
caterpillars invade stanford
April 3, 2007 at 1:03 pm | sam | grad lifeCaterpillars have infiltrated the Stanford campus. Hairy little guys are everywhere. They were around last year, but there are many many more this spring. I’m a big fan of nature, but this is some perversion of nature; an itchy, crawly, icky perversion.
They come repelling down from the trees and buildings and then crawl to the places that we want to walk. The doors to my building, for instance:
Or all over the picnic tables. They were completely covered like this corner before the sun moved (I think they like the shade):
For a little while, I thought that it was a ploy of the professors to get students to spend more time in lab, because being outside is not very pleasant. But the school/department has decided to hire someone to spray them off the buildings with water. Here’s an except of an email from our indespensable (seriously) Facilities Manager:
All,
After prolonged negotiation with Stanford authorities, the oak moth infestation loses to chemistry. Tomorrow morning, the infestation of oak moths will be attacked. The buildings will be power washed to remove the bugs and the bugs will be sprayed once on the ground with chemicals rendering them inert. The oak trees and grounds will be treated on Saturday.
Better living through chemistry–
The Managment
Hopefully we’ll be able to go back outside soon.
any matlab gurus out there???
April 2, 2007 at 9:44 am | sam | everyday science, help me, softwareI need some help with my Matlab m-file. Any geniuses know how to save a figure without the border?
Details:
- The m-file produces an array of numbers: columns indicate the x- and rows the y-position of a pixel of intensity denoted by the number’s value
- I make a figure and use the command
pcolor
- I turn the
axis off
- I save using the
saveas
command
Basically, I want the pcolor
figure alone so I can import it into a different program and click on the image to move a stage to that location. Having a border means the stage will move to the wrong place. (I know this is a clunky solution to a scanning-stage program. Shut up. Stop making fun of me.)
Any thoughts? I’ve found that imwrite
saves only the image array, but I don’t know how to use pcolor
or shading 'interp'
with imwrite
.
To encourage random people to help me with my research, I’ll send an EDS magnet to the first person who tells me how to do this correctly—or at least points me in the right direction. I’ll update y’all as soon as I know.
[Update: Here’s a good image I created. See comments below.
I know, it’s flipped. But I can easily deal with that.
We have a winner, but I might send more magnets for more elegant solutions.]
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