When we fired up all cylinders on our majestic fish apparatus today, we discovered…leaks. Nothing tremendous, no sprays of water under pressure all over the place, just a couple of slow, steady, trickling drips. We demand perfection since this will be running 24 hours a day for months on end. So joins are being resealed and retested. Damn science. Damn engineering. Damn plumbing.
Have no fear, we’re just pushing back teleostageddon a few days. But the Daniocalypse will happen! We cannot be stopped now! The device is nearly complete!
Cue maniacal laughter, stage left.
I eagerly await teleostageddon!
Isn’t Teleostageddon scheduled to be on the Syfy channel two weeks from now?
It should be.
Call me, SyFy…we’ll do lunch.
bah. Your
armiesnaviesschools of diminutive cyprinids don’t scare me.Fish sammiches, of course.
There is something fishy about this whole plan.
@Nerd @6:
Are zebrafish edible? Japanese niboshi is made with juvenile sardines that are about the same size…
Experiment; the necessary evil.
PZ if you put a webcam in your lab you can market your Piscine Production Pools as Feline Fantasy Flicks.
Say you’re going to call it The Glooper … it’ll be called The Glooper, right? Please?
.
Though of course if you do you’ll have to mind the effect of changing water levels on the world’s gold reserves and the coins down the back of the sofa.
PZ: Your cyprinid armies cannot stand against my weaponized Viral Hemorrhagic Septicemia!!!!!!!!!!!
Fools. Everyone knows that Mycobacterium marinum are the real harbingers of the apocalypse.
Am I going to have to deploy the death ray to end this?
Tropical tank? What kinda filter ya runnin’?
Leaks? That sounds like the work of an anti-American traitor who needs to be prosecuted well beyond the fullest extent of the law.
Fiddle with the inverter flange on the deglutinating framistat. If that doesn’t work, try a bigger hammer. If all else fails, turn it off and turn it on again,
And AR? Please tell us that you’re not actually working on that?
Ask PZ, I was simply trying to funny, and failing it appears.
FOR SCIENCE!!!!!
Got leaks? Two words: duct. tape.
You can’t run a evil enterprise without it.
And Zip ties. They have replaced chewing gum and baling wire….
I thought you wrote “magnetic fish apparatus”. Made me wonder just what kind of experiments you are performing.
@Nerd of Redhead, after watching 6 seasons of Burn Notice, I’ve started carrying Zip ties in my purse (yes guys, I’m a SAHD, I have a purse) just in case I need emergency handcuffs.
tim rowledge, Ersatz Haderach: I don’t work with it personally, but it would be quite easy to get my hands on freeze-dried stock, as it isn’t a human pathogen or a USDA select agent.
I’m not laughing. I had hemmoragic septicemia sweep through a colony once before, it was heart-breaking.
And I’ve had contaminating viruses ruin my Vero spinner stocks. Loosing months of work is never fun, but if I was making a joke about my cells taking over the world and someone jokingly threatened to defeat my cellular horde with Ebola, I would be amused. I see very little difference.
So, PZ will take over the world with The Device. He will always write it as “The Device”, capitalized. It’s a little harder to speak in Initial Capital Letters, but it sounds creppy and he Will Manage. Just as soon as he fixes the Leaks, that is.
FOR INFINITE SCIENCE!!!!!
All your tank are belong us.
Well, I for one welcome our new zebrafish overlords.
Oh, and #22? Rescue Tape — marvelous self-sealing silicone tape, ideal for small seeps, and comes in a variety of pretty colours, including transparent.
Eamon Knight: You have just made my frickin’ month if Rescue Tape works as advertised. I have not once managed to get fluid lines set up properly in my lab without spending hours (days!) dealing with leaks.
My usual solution is to just keep adding PTFE tape to things until the pain finally stops.
Another word for the lexicon.
As someone who deals with crazy high vacuum systems (i.e. 1 – 10 e-6 torr), I completely sympathize with your problems. There are dozens of connections and any one can destroy the system. Too much teflon tape, too little, too much torque, too little, just about anything can screw up the whole system. At least with water you can SEE your problems. I read about your system the last time you posted and it looks awesome. Good luck sorting everything out.
Stopping these leaks, are you trying to stop the “trickle down” effect? Think of your assistants, man!
I think he’s a pisces, probably working for scale.
Chris Clarke and sundiver will get that reference.
Plastic piping? Joining that stuff to create a leak-free system isn’t quite as simple as it may seem. A good friend lives in a high rise condo in Vancouver. The entire water supply system in the building had to be re-plumbed years after construction because it was leaking; the plumber who’d done the work evidently didn’t know how to glue the joints.
[The re-plumbing was a Major Bad, as all the pipes were inside walls, which had to be broken open. And my friend’s unit got flooded because the re-work on a floor above him leaked, too.]
I have a heating system like that! OK, plus the occasional addition of somewhat pressurized flooding.