Just a little bit. I tore open a tiny corner of the one egg sac I have right now, and it looks like a batch of fine healthy eggs, and then I quickly folded the bit of sac over it and restored it to the incubator. I’ve been maintaining moderate humidity for it, and it seems to be working.
Otherwise, while I’ve been waiting for the spiders to reproduce, I’ve been cleaning up my lab fairly thoroughly. I threw out stuff from 15 years ago today, and the benchtops are looking tidy, and I washed a mass of dirty glassware. I’ll have to give everyone a video tour once I’m done. It’s been surprisingly pleasant doing mundane tasks around the lab space lately.
It’s been surprisingly pleasant doing mundane tasks around the lab space lately.
I find that preparing shop-space for a project is a wonderful time for meditating on the project and what needs to be done. If I’m clearing out a space and I don’t have that good feeling, it usually means that I’ve missed something important. Like I’m not wearing my fire-retardant pants or something.
But doesn’t it feel odd not having fish tanks bubbling away? Scientists rarely make such radical shifts as you have made.
Not at all. Actually, I’ve been slow. My grad advisor, Chuck Kimmel, used to fill us with dread when he went away for a sabbatical, because we knew he’d come back full of new ideas. Before I joined the lab, he was an immunologist; then he was a synapse mapping guy in Ambystoma; at the time I went to Oregon, he was switching over to zebrafish, studying Mauthner & reticulospinal pathways; halfway through my grad program, he went off to study gap junctions & came back with fluorescent probes and lineage mapping techniques for studying blastula/gastrula stage embryos; when I visited after graduation, he was raising bowfins and studying cartilage development.
I’ve been a stick-in-the-mud for decades by comparison. I’m finding it invigoration to throw a revolution in my lab.
America should try it.
Nurturing, tidying, please tell me you aren’t wearing heels, a dress & a string of pearl’s, like Barbara Billingsly (Mrs. Cleaver).
Manly men can be nurturing & tidying, too.
Did observing them collapse their wavelength? Is this how one sciences?
Manly men can also wear heels, a dress, and a string of pearls, as well as being nurturing and tidy. Particularly nice for a Sunday afternoon tea. NB: Heels are tricky, plus hard to find in 12s, so be careful if you give it a try. The rest is a snap.
Before I retired part of my job was to inspect pressure vessels to ensure that they were safe to use. I once had to certify the autoclaves at a new laboratory for a London university. The labs were beautifully pristine. No researchers had been allowed near.
A year later I went back to re-certify the same autoclaves, and had difficulty finding them.