Notices by Geoff 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 (_thegeoff@mastodon.social)

Every day is a school day - especially when you're a science technician.

Had a query about a haemocytometer, dug around in the store rooms, turns out we have one. Never even heard of them, 5 years into the job.
It's basically a highly specialised microscope slide, but etched with grids on a similar scale to biological cells (originally used for red blood cells, hence the name), tricky to use but I got the hang of it in half an hour or so. Lovely bit of kit, nice skill to learn.

In my defence, I trained as a physicist with a bit of Earth sciences, but I love it when the biologists throw me curveballs. Mars will come to fear my botany powers. #MapOfACat

@freemo In the real world (but possibly a lesser film pitch), the horror would be a physicist discovering a true free energy source, and going mad trying to track down the non-existent error.

80s: The A-Team
90s: MacGyver
00s: Mythbusters
10s: The Martian

What's today's kids' reference for "locked in a room with a bunch of random stuff and a problem to solve"? Asking for a high school science technician...

Now in our third year of "this experiment never works" working beautifully, thanks to a 17yr old biologist I asked to try a bunch of different protocols, of her own choosing. All hail R MS.

(Yeast agar plates, with various antifungal creams. Trick was innoculating them *just*, as in minutes, before students used them, so the yeast never takes hold in the ideal growth conditions.)

Death: "MR JAMES EARL JONES?"

JEJ: "IS IT THAT TIME ALREADY?"

Death: "ARE YOU DOING MY VOICE?"

JEJ: "NO. PRATCHETT WROTE YOU WITH MY VOICE IN MIND."

Death: "WOW. THAT'S A FIRST."

JEJ: "AND THE ONLY TIME. IN ETERNITY. BEER?"

Death: "I THINK I NEED ONE."

James gently took his hand and led him into the desert.

Just another quiet night over the bay (about 20 minutes real-time) 😎
#Aurora #Scotland #Highlands

@rlmcneary2 @pluralistic There was a similar case with BT in the 2000s, they inserted their own adverts into web pages when serving them to UK customers. I noticed when they did it to my own site. They got a stern letter about copyright infringement, which it was, and swiftly dropped the idea.
The difference here is that the webpage is delivered directly to the user's machine, and the user then chooses how to modify the data.

@rupert @rlmcneary2 @pluralistic They've still got the issue of modifying somebody else's work though - if e.g. you (on your cheap ISP) load my gambling addiction website, and the ISP has inserted roulette adverts....?

@rupert @rlmcneary2 @pluralistic The difference is that a commercial organisation has adapted my work before delivering it to you. Put it this way, if you download an ad-encourager, running on your device, which inserts adverts into any web page you download, then fair enough. My data has been delivered to you as intended, you then chose to modify it for your own use.
But when a third party modifies it for their own profit, they breach my copyright.

@CloudyMrs Oddly, don't remember that one. Challenger, Hillsborough, yes, but I don't recall hearing about Piper Alpha. Dad switched jobs to the HSE's offshore department at pretty much exactly that time, his introduction to the job was the investigation. I had Piper Beta T shirts as a kid, because they felt uncomfortable with the name "Piper Bravo" for a while, as it sounded celebratory.

@danhon Sequel injection.

Had the last-year-of-primary students in today, doing a few classes to introduce them to the big secondary school. Always fun. But due to a timetabling snafu I found a French teacher covering them in a science class...and we've got specific risk assessment stuff with those classes, and the French teacher (rightly) had no idea what was going on.
So I'm winging a practical science class with a non-science teacher there as backup.
Credit where due, the kids were brilliant. Engaged, behaved, smart.

Managed to burn out my drill - motor's gone. So either another hundred and something quid on a new one, or £15 on a new motor (coincidentally saving the two perfectly good battery packs that don't work with current models).
But the new motor had a round axle, not the flattened side I need. So clamp the motor, needle nosed pliers to hold the axle (filing something that rotates is a nightmare), then clamp the pliers to the bench. Fiddly, but chuffed how well it worked.

You'd probably want to supplement it with other stuff, and you'd need more in winter, but 3,000 calories a day is going to keep you alive outside, if not *ideally*, for weeks.

Just tried a little of my "eat now" one. Yeah, as he says, not going to win any baking competitions, but not unpleasant. Kind of halfway between a biscuit and a dense bread, with a bit of a dumpling thing going on from the suet. You can tell it's calorie rich, if I was hungry in the hills this would be very welcome.

Rough calorie estimate per biscuit:
Suet: 385
Oats: 180
Flour: 360
Dried fruit: 50

Total: 975 - so yeah, three a day sounds about right for somebody in the outdoors.

Mine are at the larger end of his examples, to give me lots of internal volume for any bacteria that show up. Salt level is similar to bread, there for flavour more than preservative properties.
10 minute bake at 200C as suggested, then I'm going to give them two to three hours at ~50C because they're a bit thicker.
And yes, one is to taste now!

Finally getting round to having a go at Fandabi Bannocks, a survival ration biscuit thing which, whilst not traditional, was very doable in the 1700s or whenever. Just a few ingredients: suet, oats, wheat flour and salt. I've added dried fruit too, but no sugar. Ultimate aim is to test the shelf life, I'm going to store them in cool, dry, but not refrigerated conditions, and take bacterial swabs ever 6 months or so from the surface and inside, see what I can grow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0cxV2vVC0U

Getting back in to coding with Rockstar. The need to make source code sound like a vaguely passable hair-rock ballad is always a fun challenge, and I'm confusing the issue by trying to make it generate the lyrics to Total Eclipse Of The Heart as the output, but without obviously including the lyrics in the source code. (Yes, it's a song that encodes another song.)
https://codewithrockstar.com/

I particularly like this one for the depth of field: grasses (cm), #aurora (100km) and stars (tens of light years)