Tobias Baskin's sort-of real time science blog
A short post today. For one thing, I just spent an hour dealing with the reservation for Laura and my stay in Rome, Italy, being peremptorily cancelled. We are supposed to check in tomorrow. We got an email this afternoon from the quaint B&B “Livia” saying sorry you cannot stay with us, our toilet has […]
Welcome to the new look Lab Fab. Not my idea. Campus IT overlords decreed that Origin, the theme used by my blog, shall be discontinued. In blog-land, the “theme” means the set of design and layout elements that control what the blog looks like. Apparently, Origin is old (and hence insecure vis a vis hacking) and […]
March 31 is International Transgender Day of Visibility (Fig. 1). Please do something nice for your trans friends today (and everyday). As for the title of today’s post, maybe it is the other way around? Last week, I was shut out from tweaking the calibration of the liquid crystals (discussed here) because the software glitch […]
I am fretful. Forgetful too, but that is a story for elsewhere. Last week, my efforts to find out what is going wrong have shown me things look very wrong. I don’t know why; I am unsure what to do next. I have appealed to my expert colleagues, Rudolf Oldenbourg and Amit Verma of Marine […]
Pinholes and pinheads! Before getting to the latest installment of the Calibration Campaign, I want to remind everyone that I welcome questions and comments (unless you are a troll!). Happy to answer. Also do hit the subscribe button so you never miss a post; and please tell your friends! With that, on to the latest. […]
Last week, I wrote about my misgivings over the 5 degrees of separation (actually, of misalignment) between the rotatable polarizer’s positioning on the microscope stage and the polarization of the microscope’s laser. In discussing with Rudolf Oldenbourg (MBL), I learned that the misalignment does not matter. What does matter is that the peaks and valleys […]
Last week, I carried on the quest for calibration. Avalon remains stubbornly out of reach. I tried things I mentioned last week and a new thing besides. The liquid crystal device seems undamaged. To have a look, I improvised a light-table next to the confocal microscope. I put a flashlight inside a jar (otherwise used […]
Last week, I had three sessions on the confocal to work on calibration. My calibration went from steaming garbage to cold leftover pizza (Fig. 1). Better, but not yet appetizing. What you are looking at in Figure 1 is the field of view that the microscope camera and I see during calibration. As I explained last […]
I can think of stronger words: mutilation? defenestration? OK, OK. I was not injured let alone thrown out of a window. This past week, for the first time, I tried to calibrate the system. What system? The one I brought here to observe and quantify polarized fluorescence on a confocal microscope. The heart of the […]
Maestro to the pit; actors to their places; its time to raise the curtain. Sure, that might be happening over at the Crescent Theatre with their latest production, but I am talking about mine: I am ready to collect data. I am ready because of wo breakthroughs that happened in January. OK, the word breakthrough implies fabulous […]