The 'look at what I did today' thread

Post by **Donald** » Mon Sep 25, 2017 8:38 pm

Back to school today. First day was a buffet followed by 3 hours of typing command line nonsense. My new university card makes me look like a blockhead too so this gif is v relevant.

89 UKDM BA4 4WS (resto job!) · Post by **wurlycorner** » Sun Oct 22, 2017 11:55 am

Command line nonsense?
How is that being all scientific?!

A couple of weeks ago I did something massively geeky;

First time I've been to a museum to see something I used to be involved in working on

YouTube · Post by **Sailor** » Mon Oct 23, 2017 9:51 pm

Yippee!

Today brought another year's MoT for the Teg.

Post by **Donald** » Wed Nov 01, 2017 12:12 am

wurlycorner wrote:Command line nonsense?
How is that being all scientific?!

It wasn’t really!

Today was proper science. Liquid nitrogen was involved. Had the ‘fun’ task of picking up protein crystals with a microscopic lasso (e.g https://i.ytimg.com/vi/i2G1fYtjXt8/maxresdefault.jpg) without breaking them, ready to go to the synchrotron.

Then structure refinement on something else (e.g. https://www.chem.uci.edu/~jsnowick/grou ... tart_2.jpg) which was actually quite fun.

Then had a look at a drokk off big magnetic machine generating around half a million times the Earth’s magnetic field, complete with superfluid helium (so at ~2 Kelvin...).

Does that sound more like it?

89 UKDM BA4 4WS (resto job!) · Post by **wurlycorner** » Wed Nov 01, 2017 7:05 pm

That sounds much more impressive, yes...

This bit in particular sounds the most important;

Donald wrote:the synchrotron

YouTube · Post by **Sailor** » Wed Nov 01, 2017 9:01 pm

Decades ago, I did some ancillary work on a superconductivity project at Culham which used liquid helium.
Anecdotally, there was a chap who snapped parts of two fingers off when a flask wasn't as sealed as he thought. From normal to brittle in milliseconds.

Post by **Donald** » Thu Nov 02, 2017 7:32 am

wurlycorner wrote:That sounds much more impressive, yes...

This bit in particular sounds the most important;

Donald wrote:the synchrotron

Although there is some bitterness that they have to go to the Diamond facility and not locally... and also Oxford now has the biggest NMR machine, not us

Liquid helium I’ve never actually been that close, liquid nitrogen... well you turn the room into a TOTP set when you spill it. It’s not really that dangerous.

Also tried out for the UC team last night

Post by **simonc** » Fri Nov 03, 2017 12:49 am

Okay, okay, it wasn't today but I dug this out as I thought you guys might like to see it. From the days when you could blag a trip into the cockpit. It was a brilliant experience, en-route to Hong Kong from Heathrow. Captain John Cater was the British Airways training Captain for the -400s, and we actually stayed in touch for a while after this. I was sat in the First Officer's seat for about two hours. Brilliant.

YouTube · Post by **Sailor** » Fri Nov 03, 2017 10:43 pm

Nice lunch, too.