February 10, 2009

Science in Winter

It's not as if nothing's been happening -- au contraire -- I've just not got around to blogging it. My bad.

For example, I left unrecorded my little flare up after step last Tuesday; and indeed, that's probably for the best, since it was very much not my finest hour. In any case, it seems to be patched up now.

Among other consequences, I did not follow up that night with my first bouncing session in roughly two and a half years, as I had planned. Instead, that pleasure was deferred to tonight, and very nice it turned out to be. I am, of course, rather rusty -- and will doubtless be aching like crazy tomorrow -- but things did gradually start coming back to me, and it's nice to know I can still scrape together a somersault if required, albeit a rather untidy one.

Last week also brought the latest Ballets C de la B outing at Sadler's Wells, founder Alain Platel's characteristically wayward take on JSB's St Matthew Passion, pitié! This was pretty familiar territory for C de la B aficionados, the usual mix of chaos, shock tactics, athleticism, beautiful music, randomly-stripped taut bodies and suffering, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it. The singers were great, especially the countertenor Serge Kakudji, and if the whole thing dragged a bit in the middle it picked up again by the end.

It has also been, on and off, fucking freezing, which may be why I'm overusing the nice warm and sunny colour scheme around here. The heating system at college has been malfunctioning, so the last couple of days have involved quite a bit of shivering in the lab. We have discovered that at least some elements of our experimental setup dislike the cold almost as much as I do. The closed-loop feedback control on the SICM's piezo actuators, for example, seems to develop a nasty chatter that completely thwarts scanning. To be fair, that might not actually be down to the cold, but it is a suspicious coincidence.

Also, for the record, HEK cells don't like expressing NMDARs. You know, in case you were wondering. We were warned about this, in fact, but it still seemed like a good idea. And perhaps it is. But I do sometimes wish that some minor parts of this whole project would just bloody work. Just one, even. For the novelty value.

To cap it off, my little beambot power supply widget for chloriding electrodes stopped working. The issue turned out to be a trivial mechanical fault with an IC socket, but I couldn't find a way of replacing it without destroying the board it was attached to, so I'm having to rebuild that bit from scratch, which is kind of annoying. It'll be out of action for a few more days, I think.

Hopefully the same will not be so for me, although after the abuse my creaky old bones have taken this evening who can be sure?

Posted by matt at February 10, 2009 11:17 PM