useless silence
so this semester my group went from 4 to 6 and this week, to 7 (but just for this week). new phd student, new post doc, and some dude on spring break that decided he wants to do more work (i think he got his phd here way back when). SO. it's fuckin' noisy as hell. the thing with carbon nanotubes is they're so small that van der waal's forces take over their movements. van der waal's forces are what enables a gecko to climb up smooth, polished, waxed glass. the filaments in its toes are so tiny that they interact with the glass on a molecular basis taking advantage of the natural oblong shapes that electron clouds tend to make in all but the most symmetric molecules. oblong electron cloud creates a polarity, albeit a very weak polarity.
either way (getting back to my lab), that means that wheneve ryou want to do anything with nanotubes involving solution...you have to mix it. and not just with a fork in a beaker. you have to use this thing called a sonicator which basically bombards your sample with high amplitude high frequency sound waves in a water bath to mix it from the inside. unfortunately that high frequency is audible and, lucky for me, i'm very sensitive to high sounds (i can still hear dog whistles, it pisses me off).
on top of that there's one'a those magnetic mixers (put a magnet in a beaker, put it on a spinning magnet and voila, automated mixing). and THEN there are TWO...wait...THREE vacuum pumps in the lab. at any given time there's usually at least one on.
and then there's the crowd.
argg.
but right now, it's silent. they all went out to lunch or meetings or classes and i have the place to myself. so what do i do? sit at my computer quietly and type away.
just felt like telling someone :)
*sigh*
