excalculus

[excalculus]

We were talking about hoarding materials at work because there's a good chance the supply chain is about to make like it's 2021. Boss meant to say get 20 liters' worth of a certain media formulation in case of emergency, but verbally typoed it to 20 microliters.

Someone asked him if he said that right.

He said yes.

Chaos.

Highlights include:

"I see we're really going in on the miniaturization!"

"-CELL CULTURE FOR ANTS???"

"Just a little taste, so you can remember what you used to have-"

[excalculus]

REBLOG IF THIS RELATES TO YOU:

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!

[excalculus]

Glass Snakes

Eicher Glass on Etsy

[excalculus]

that green sheen on a purple background for the new version looks an awful lot like crystal violet. Surely there's other stuff going on but if it has anything to do with the thing I tried to stain bacteria and succeeded at staining my hands, clothes, etc. with back in the day that's very funny.

The Noodlers thing pisses me off so much because as someone who works in wet lab where bleach and alcohol regularly go everywhere, I'm one of what's probably a relatively small group of people who do need and benefit from the properties of the bulletproof inks in daily use. There are alternatives and I'm sure I'll find at least basic black, blue, and so on that I like but augh.

Ngl i prefer the 2016 version purple on the right.

[excalculus]

The entirety of Massachusetts

Submitted by Anonymous

[excalculus]

I'm still working on finishing the quilt (banished cat to bathroom jail and got the basting done) but I also have a bunch of side projects/experiments going at any given time. Good news, I may have found a way to make a thing I've been thinking about for a while. Bad news, it's bead crochet with 11/0 seed beads, upholstery thread, and a 0.75mm hook. It's very possible I'll give up or get distracted before getting anywhere even if this test piece works perfectly, but if I don't this might be what finally destroys my eyesight and/or gives me carpal tunnel.

[excalculus]

[excalculus]

Trying to baste the layers of a quilt together and my weights are a small bench vise, a rock hammer, and a cat who wants to party.

It's not going great.

[excalculus]

Flying Without a Rudder

Aircraft typically use a vertical tail to keep the craft from rolling or yawing. Birds, on the other hand, maneuver their wings and tail feathers to counter unwanted motions. (Image credit: E. Chang/Lentink Lab; research credit: E. Chang et al.; via Physics Today) Read the full article

[excalculus]

Normally when I post something it gets a handful of notes in the first few days, and then nothing ever again. But I think the rabies cure post got enough interaction in the initial burst that it's probably showing up in search results somewhere?

Anyways I can now guess pretty well when there's been a concerning rabies event based on that post getting new notes.

[excalculus]

I've been here for a long time and will probably continue to be here until it actually 404's. That being said we've been getting concerning news about both our glorious CEO and tumblr's long-term prospects for years now, so I'm setting up some alternate options to try out. Some other places to find me if tumblr goes down for good:

Wordpress blog - made this back around the time of the NSFW ban for updated edits of my longer biology posts, which I... never fully finished doing. Oops. Given the current problems are Automattic related, I no longer consider this to be a fully separate backup and may or may not continue to work on it.

Dreamwidth (excalculus) - newly made and currently blank, but likely this is where longer form things will be posted in the future.

Bluesky (excalculus) - also newly made and currently blank.

Mastodon - I'm still looking at servers but will be making an account soon. I'm going to be trying both this and bluesky for shorter stuff and socializing.

[excalculus]

Really annoying how much of my job now is figuring out curses. It's not even in our lab this time and it's extra stupid because there were clearly multiple of them combining for a result of "everything that isn't something near-bulletproof like a HEK cell fucking insta-dies".

Last year we narrowed things down enough that we knew of two and approximately where they were, bypassed one, and left it at the people in the other lab needed to bully the manufacturer into honoring their service contract on the stupid machine to definitively identify and fix the second.

So far this year, the repairs have allowed us to get further and reveal two more curses, one of which is a recurrence of the one we thought we beat last year and therefore suggests an unrelated issue that needs to be hunted down separately.

But we've at least temporarily solved both of those and things might be working? It'll probably melt down the instant we try to ramp up usage even a little but the small test runs lived. Which is nice, because once again one of the incubators here is acting weird, and was last seen throwing a fit and refusing to even steri-cycle after being serviced...

Well, we definitely have another cursed incubator on our hands! I've yet to determine the exact nature of the curse but it's different and also more severe than the last one so that's fun.

[excalculus]

It looks like today is going to be a night of checking up with my friends to see which ones of them are now unemployed… Tumblr seems to have been hit hard

[excalculus]

Gandolfo line VPI T+ aztec - (boa imperator)

I love this boy so much.

[excalculus]

As a reminder if you're wondering why Gundam has so many weird names for people and things, this is why.

[excalculus]

have a heart, pls