Thursday, August 31, 2006

Ernesto Update

Well, I thought I was going to be severely disappointed by Ernesto when I woke up this morning and it wasn't even raining. But the rain came eventually and now after about 5 hours, I have to say, there are some pretty impressive puddles. Mind you, it hasn't reached the levels of last thursday's thunderstorm. Here's a cool satellite image I found on the NOAA site:



It looks like we'll only get a glancing blow from Ernesto now. the current storm track prediction says it will make landfall somewhere just north of Myrtle Beach near the North Carolina-South Carolina border.

I went into work this morning but MUSC was deserted so I ended up coming back home after lunch, just in case the water got too high. So I'll leave you with some pictures from my walk home, around 2pm.





I'll update if anything amazing happens in the next few hours. Otherwise I'll just be on my neighour's porch, drinking beer and watching cars try to drive through the lake that was Ashley Avenue.

- Mr. Ed

Update to the update - 11:50pm
Nothing has happened. No, seriously, nothing at all has happened. Ernesto was crap. I mean a half day at work/school is all well and good, but it has to be justified with a least a semi-serious storm; not some pansy-esque, pretence at a proper weather like we had today. Well, it looks like there'll be clear skies tomorrow and that means only one thing, back to the grind.

Nah-night.

Dog loves cake

Steinbrenner spotted this the other day and told me about it. We passed one of the posters last night so I took this photo for the P Club.

As opposed to all those dogs that are just 'so-so' about cake?

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

'Ello Ernesto...

It seems Tropical Depression Ernesto is coming to town. Once Ernesto moves off Florida and over the Atlantic again it should strenghten to a minimal tropical storm again, but the way everyone is behaving around here you'd think it was a category 5 monster: Classes are cancelled tomorrow morning at MUSC, there's a voluntary evacuation of Charleston county, and shelters are opening up at 3pm today.


The map above is from the NOAA National Hurricane Center website. Hurricane central at weather.com is also pretty good for following storms but I prefer NOAA. And just for good measure, here is our local NOAA site.

Anyway it looks like tomorrow will be pretty wet and stormy - just like last thursday, really. Naturally, I'll keep the P club up to date on any exciting storm-related developments.

- Mr. Ed

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

My Goodness, my mantid!

I have to say, I had given up all hope of ever seeing Milton, Myrtle or any of their twiggy brethren again a long time ago. I assumed that they had moved on to fresh hunting grounds or been eaten by a bird or something. So it was quite a surprise to see a very large mantid clinging to the plametto by my porch on Saturday. I have to credit my new (and very nice) neighbour Alison for spotting it. Oddly enough we had just been chatting about my mantids, since she had seen one on my mint plant when she came to look at the flat next door a month or so ago. I had just finished lamenting their demise/departure when she looked over my shoulder and said, "Hey, isn't that one over there?"



And by golly was it ever a mantid! The fucker was huge - about 4 1/2 inches long and brown not green like they had been (the fully mature Carolina Mantid is brown). I don't know what sort of scuffle it had got into, but it seemed to be missing one of it's front claw-leg-type-things. Since the front legs are the business bit of a mantid I'm not sure how well a one-legged guy will fair in the long term. Anyway, it stayed on the palm frond all afternoon and evening but when I checked in the morning there was no sign of it. I can't be sure that it was one of mine but I'm going to assume that it hadn't travelled that far since it didn't have wings yet. Around this time of year Mantids shed their skin a final time and develop wings so they can fly off and find a mate. For the males mating is the end of things. In fact, sometimes they don't even get to finish that; often the females turn around and bite their heads off in the middle of copulation. Luckily (for the species not the individual) their bodies are able to finish the job with out the head - a trait that may not be unique to Mantids according to some of my female friends. Having devoured her mate, the female then lays eggs in a foamy substance that hardens into an egg case and shortly afterwards joins her mate in the hereafter. The next spring the little nymphs hatch and it all starts again. Oh, the circle of life! You'll pardon me if I don't break into a rendition of one of Elton John's most stomach-churning* efforts at this point. Instead, I think I'll take my sangria outside and see if I can find the blighter again.


-Mr. Ed

*Which is really saying something.

Saturday, August 26, 2006

Soulful Saturday - VII

After a few weeks away I thought it was time to bring Souful Saturday back. So here's Otis Redding, on tour in Europe in 1967, singing "try a little tenderness."



If you wanted to catch up and watch some of the Soulful Saturdays you may have missed, here are links to the the previous posts:

Soulful Saturday
Soulful Saturday - Encore un fois!
Soulful Saturday - le troisieme partie
Souful Saturday - #4
Soulful Saturday Five!
Soulful Saturday: The Sixth Serving


- Mr. Ed

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Back to my southern stables

I got back to chucktown late last night. After 10 days of lovely weather at home it was a bit of a shock to walk through the sliding glass doors of the airport and into a wall of hot humidness outside. We woke up this morning to a rather impressive thunderstorm. I went out on the porch and watched the street fill with a foot or so of water in a about 10 minutes. Then Steinbrenner came running out of the shower - the shower! - when a flash-and-crash was so close it shook the whole house. I told her what I thought everyone in the whole world knows - that it isn't the best idea to stand in a column of water during an electrical storm. It's still coming down like stair rods right now, actually. Bugger me that was a big bolt close by.
Anyway, we had a really wonderful time back in blighty and now we're safely, but a little sadly, back in Charleston again. Bloody hell, there must be two feet of water in the street now. Lightning seems to be moving away a bit though.

Full details and pictures of the trip when I can get around to it. Steiners just brought me some coffee and I think we'll sit out on the porch watch the cars swim down the street for a while.


- Mr. Ed

Friday, August 11, 2006

Until further notice BA has halted all flights from the UK.

BA announced:
"I ain't getting on no plane, crazy fool"


Well thats super.


- Philip Via Matt

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Well I'm really looking forward

to flying back home now.

- Mr. Ed

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Synchrotron photos

Outside SER-CAT - the attractive walkway lighting.

another view of the outside of SER-CAT.

In the hutch on the BM station. The monitor in the background (it says "top camera" below the monitor) shows a zoom in on a crystal, which is held in a loop with a droplet of cryo-protectant. The big metal cylinder at the bottom of the picture is the liquid nitrogen reservoir for the robotics set-up. We haven't used it yet but it should really speed things up when it's up and runnning.

The goniometer (blocky thing on the right that says "270") is where we mount our crystals. At the end (on the left) of it you can see a thin copper pin and at the end of that very thin hair-like thing. that's the loop where the crystal is held (which you can't see because it's microscopic). The cold head (the thing pointing diagonally down from the top left towards the pin and loop) bathes the crystal in a stream of dry nitrogen cooled to 100K (around -180C). The x-ray collumator (or source) is obscured form view by the cold head, but it would be shooting just to the right of you if you were standing where the picture is taken from. The thin metal thing that comes from the bottom left and ends in front of the loop and pin is the direct beam stop and it is lined up with the crystal and the x-ray collimator.

Wires. They look important don't they - buggered if I know what they do.

The work station. Three monitors of non-stop gek action. On the left is the latest diffraction image collected (smeary blck ring-like thing - you can see the white shadow of the beam stop on the image) in the middle is the control panel where we enter our data collection parameters and the right is the archiving window. You can also see our lab book, where we write down everything we do, becuase even - sorry especially - in this computer age, nothing beats a good old-fashioned pen and paper for keeping records. That red cylinder is a water cup.

The view down the corridor that goes all the way around the accelerator ring at the back of the experiment hall. Those are the tricycles that provide endless fun at 3 in the morning and you can just about see the curve of the corridor. It takes about 10 minutes to go all the way around the ring at a leisurely cycling pace.

Cryst-to-the izzle oh-graphizzle! Too much coffee and the discovery of fingerless gloves led to this nonsense in the ID station hutch. The gloves (actually cotton gloveliners) are very useful for keeping our fingers warm when we dip them in liquid nitrogen to manipulate our crystals, so why some genius thought they'd order fingerless gloves is beyond me. When we turned up though there was a bag of 200 of the fingerless ones and only four very nasty used pairs with fingers. We'd left our own at home, naturally. I probably have some finger-related disease as a result.

More silliness.

And yet more silliness when Swanny arrived around 11ish. I think Neil still had the tape on his back at this point.

Thunderstorms out of the window on the way home!

-Mr. Ed

Sunday, August 06, 2006

Synchrotron Sunday

Update 2:35am: So I thought I'd go ahead and start a new post for the 'new day,' not that I've noticed much of a change mind you. On the plus side, I'm collecting data set number two though - a substrate soak no less! In other news, Ailsa has just made a fresh pot of coffee, Neil is fast asleep on the sofa (driver's privilege) and I'm taking the spare moments my data collection has afforded me to 'get my blog on.'

We haven't had an update on the scores in a while. Well, it looks like Ailsa's streets ahead - must be 6 or 7 now - where as Neil and I are level-pegging on a rather paltry two.

Just before Neil fell asleep I finally told him that for the last 4 hours or so he'd had piece of tape on his back that said "I eat cock, 'cause I love cock, give me cock," at which point he pulled a piece of tape off my back that said "kick me" that he'd put there about an hour before. Oh the japery! Yes it truly is a laugh a minute an hour around here. And blimey - just eleven more of our earth-hours to go!

Update 5:22am: Not enjoying this at all. Not at all. More coffee.

Update 6:09am: The sun is up. I feel quite odd. Situation summary -we're running on empty and rapidly out of time. More coffee? I couldn't - I'm spent.

Update 7:27am: I just went outside a minute ago - it's a lovely morning. There's a dewy freshness to the air which is a welcome change to the humidity we're used to in Charleston. It reminds me of early mornings camping in France, when I was little. And it looks a bit like Northern France around here actually; open, ever-so-slightly rolling countryside that's vaguely industrial and pretty dull. There's cow parsley and cornflowers and it even smells earthy and a bit like France. Perhaps Illinois is approriately named after all. Or maybe my exhaustion is getting the bette of me.

Update 8:45am My eyes keep closing involuntarily and I think I'm going to lose my mind any minute. We're doing everything we can to finish early. We have just over two hours left on the ID beamline and just over 5 hours left on the BM beamline - though we won't use it all. Hopefully we can get out of here by 12:30 or 1pm and then get to the airport and have a (well deserved) drink or seven. Just over 12 hours until we get back to chucktown and therefore around 13or so until bed time. That's assuming there are no delays with the TWO MOTHER-FUCKING FLIGHTS we have between us and our beds. I swear, if there are any delays then some people will be very very sorry. I'm not in the mood to be effed around.

I want to sleep, to lie down and close my eys, that's all I want to do. It's not much to ask is it?

Oh yeah, if you were wondering about the names of the beamlines... ID stands for "insertion device" (heh heh). I don't know how it works, but I do know that there is an important part called a "wiggler." Seriously. The BM stands for "bending magnet" (snicker). Presumably it's got some magnets somewhere and they bend things. It might be a bit more complicated than that, I'm not sure - not sure I care right now, anyway.

Update 11:05am Well, we've stopped work on the ID beamline and handed it over to some geks from UGA. Just one or two more crystals to shoot on the BM beamline and it'll be time to head to the airport - not a moment too soon, I might add. We're quiting a little early, but what's an hour or two when you haven't slept in 27 hours? Quite. Bring on the over-priced airport booze says I.

So this is the last post from SER-CAT. If I don't instantly fall into a coma-like sleep when I get home this evening I might post a few photos of some of the highlights of our trip. You know...

"lately it occurs to me what a long, strange trip its been.
Truckin, I'm a goin home. whoa whoa baby, back where I belong,
Back home, sit down and patch my bones, and get back truckin on.
Hey now get back truckin home."



-Mr. Ed

Saturday, August 05, 2006

Synchrotron Saturday

So we're here at SERCAT and we've started to collect data. So far the results are less than impressive. First, Neil mounted a loop with no crystal. Then I mounted what looked like a nice crystal but it turned out to be rather iced-up. Despite attempts at annealing (read putting my ID card in front of the cryo-stream for a second) we decided to ditch it and add another crystal to the rapidly growing "wall of shame."

So, we're off to a flying start and there's just 26 hours to go!

Update 12:15pm: Neil decided to throw his second crystal on the ground. Oh this is going to be a long (dare I say hard?) day and night (and then day).

Update 2:37pm: The current data set score is: Me - 0, Neil - 0, Ailsa - 0.5. We're about to get the second beamline up and running and thus double our chances of not getting any decent data. Super!

Update 4:01pm: Still no good data for me. Neil got lucky on the the other beamline. We're going for a little ride around on the tricylces now.

Update 7:27pm: Things took a turn for the better as I finally had a crystal that diffracted reasonably well. Collected a nicely redundant data set - redundancy being a good thing in this instance.

Whilst waiting for the data collection to run we started drinking coffee. A lot of coffee. Then we found the fingerless gloves. The gloves (and the cafeine buzz) inspired the manufacture of a trucker hat from spare paper and tape. Crys-to-the-izzle-ography bi-atches!

Lord only knows what awaits us in the sleep-deprived/stimulant-loaded hours to come.

Update 9:54pm: Things were getting bad around 8:30ish, so we had a little break and went to pick-up pizza. It was most yummers. Now we're re-fueled and ready for the night's work - no sleep 'til Brooklyn, or some such nonsense.


Update 12:34am: A little while ago we had a visit from our chum Swanny. He used to work in our lab, now he's a post-doc at Mount Sinai in NYC. Coincidentally he (and most of his lab) was here at the APS this weekend too. They were working at the beamline in Sector 17 - IMCA CAT - run by a load of big Pharma companies. Anyway, he popped by and we had a little breaky and a chat - which was nice. His lab has finished for the evening and he was on his way back to the guesthouse and a comfy bed - lucky bastard. We, on the other hand, are only half way through - I don't mind telling you, it's getting pretty old now...

Time for a slice of cold pizza, I fancy.

- Mr. Ed

Friday, August 04, 2006

Oh the acronyms!


In a few hours Neil and Ailsa (two work chums) and I are off for a weekend of fun at the APS, part of the ANL (run by the DoE) where we'll be using the SER-CAT beamline.

What does all this mean? Well I know you don't really care, but I'm going to tell you anyway.

The Argonne National Laboratory, is a U.S. Department of Energy facility located just outside of Chicago. We're going to collect data at the world's second brightest X-ray source, the Advanced Photon Source and here are some quick facts about the APS. Here's a schematic of the beamlines at the APS. We're going to be at ID-22/BM-22 since MUSC is a member of the South East Regional Collaborative Access Team or SER-CAT .

We'll get up there tonight and go to bed early and get lots of rest. Then we'll get up early saturday, work for 27 hours straight - collecting reams of stonking data we hope - and fly home, dazed and confused, on sunday evening. I'm planning to blog through the night on saturday, worky-work permitting of course, so stay tuned to the P club for updates on the gekkery!

- Mr. Ed