"the labrador"

It takes about 11-12 seconds for a vortex to travel up a column of TBSt (Tris buffer, salt, and Tween detergent) about 5.7 cm in diameter and 36.5 cm tall in a borosilicate glass cylinder. I don't know anything about fluid dynamics, but doing ELISAs is driving me to boredom so I was messing around with the magnetic stir plate, to see how long you have to stir something to get it all mixed. I guess it's influenced by things like viscosity, density, friction with the surface of the vessel, etc.

No idea how fast the stirrer was rotating, either. Oops. Well, I did say I'm no physicist.

If I ever have a daughter one thing I'm definitely not going to name her is Elisa, Eliza, or any variants thereof. When you're a little kid with big dreams they never tell you that all this saving-the-world-from-horrible-diseases stuff is going to involve a lot of sitting in an chilly lab, pipetting stuff in and out of little tubes. That's one reason why I think modern education should bring back apprenticeship as a mode of formal education. For kids who know what they want to do, it'll help them learn relevant things in their field much faster so they'll actually have more time for "liberal education" stuff, and for those who think they know what they want to do but really don't know, it'll help them figure this out and stop screwing around in an unsuitable career.

My roommate RB is starting out in vet school, her first love, at age 41 - after a couple of decades in theatre, which she eventually decided was 'silly'. Her older siblings are in human medicine. When they were younger they told her she was 'too dumb' to do medicine - and she believed them. Alamak, oi.

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Another worm story:

Me: Hey, SN, remember that developmental biology textbook? Judith's name is in it! [Judith is the PI ("principal investigator") of the lab she works in]

SN: What section is it in?

me: It's about C. elegans gonads.

SN: Oh yeah, Judith's a big gonad person.

This took place around 8 am yesterday, so I don't think she was awake enough to realize what she had said, and I didn't either until later. ^_^

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My friend AT and I like to get together to complain about how Americans can't spell or punctuate properly. All the safety manuals that our lab had to go through before the inspection last month have "principal investigator" spelled as "principle". Haisyo.

There's a joke that turns on the similarity of the two words, though:

Teachers leaving school -
When principals retire, they lose their faculties.
When the faculty retire, they lose their principles.