Results tagged “science” from Test blog

It's like sitting at the control deck of a starship; in front of you floats a steel plate, roughly a metre squared, suspended perfectly at the horizontal by pneumatic cylinders driven by a compressor in the next room; to the right, a pair of flat panel displays offer up a digital control panel of mind numbing complexity, a small box covered in green-glowing buttons dismisses its size by looking very important, and twin multi-gigahertz computers controlled via bluetooth add to the technoarray with their steady hum and sheer bulk; to the left, a squat panel of eight illuminated switches flanks a rack of heavy black steel that carries four cylinders; two Helium-Neon lasers, each about a foot and a half long and two inches in diameter, a single diode laser nestled beneath them, and to their right, an argon laser, five full inches in cross-section and mounted by a fuck-off-huge cooling fan.

And in the middle, sat square on the steel plate, and connected to the flanking equipment by a quarrel of fibre optic cabling and wire is the photomultiplier, the centre of this mechanical universe; behold, the confocal microscope, all £190 000 of it. And I am taking it for a test drive.

I like that I can be left to assess $350 000 worth of scientific wizardry all on my own. Put me behind the wheel of a car worth three hundred and fifty times less, and I'd feel far more concerned about doing something wrong -- perhaps because doing something wrong in a car is more likely to involve my neck -- but there are no cars here; on my planet, the poofs are armed with lasers.

The reason for heading over to Hungary was to participate in a seminar day at the beautiful Budapesti Mûszaki és Gazdaságtudományi Egyetem (Budapest University of Technology and Economics) where a couple of researchers in my field are based; the sciencey part of the visit was actually very interesting, if difficult to sit through (08:00 through to 18:30) for the lack of air conditioning in a stuffy room in a still and humid city basking under sunshine at 35 °C.

Though eight people were attending from my laboratory, only two of that number were travelling with me; we arrived in Budapest a day earlier, on Malév, the national carrier, and I got the perfect seat, with a full view of the engine and the outboard section of the wing, the latter being something which has fascinated me since about the age of three; as always, my face and hands were glued to the window during landing and take-off, lest I miss the crucial changes in flap, slat and aileron positioning that give rise to the sheer craziness that is the lifting off of something that heavy into the skies (no, but seriously, a tiny 737-500 weighs in at 55 000 kilogrammes, a 747-400 F series at 390 000 [squillion] kilogrammes. I know it's all perfectly rational, but it's still bloody amazing and I can't take it for granted).

Okay, I've wiped the drool from my face.

Checking in to our student accommodation was an event, since the building was clearly a relic of the soviet occupation, and came complete with scary wiring, peeling, leaded paint, hole-in-the-wall showers (it was like having a giant piss a column of water at you from somewhere on high, but lacking the thrill of watersports), and those magical Eastern European shelved toilets that just defy further elaboration. And it was warm, fairly clean, and comfortable; good enough for me.

We had the whole day to go 'sploring. In fact, when we weren't playing academician and socialising with our colleagues, we were out exploring, and eating, and looking, and touching, and walking for hours at a time whilst getting very sweaty in the crotch. It was great! One of the attractive features of the city is certainly its architecture, and if you visit Szt. Istvàn Basilica (I'm guessing St. Stephen's) and climb to the top of the dome, you'll find yourself with the ideal 360° panorama of the city which affords views of many of the more famous landmarks.

King Stephen united Hungary under Roman Catholicism in 896 A.D., following a message from the Pope that ordered him to convert or get out. He converted, don't you know, and was later beatified for his display of exceptional courage.

The food proved very satisfying almost without exception, though it is widely geared toward staunch carnivores; we ended up in a restaurant called Fatál, which was anything but that (a fatál is a wooden platter), where we were served things like this, and more, for peanuts, which equated to one of the best meals I've had in a long while.

Following the end of the seminar programme, we ended up going to the Gellért bath house, a huge, famous, baroque affair of sculpted masonry, pools and thermal baths - all radioactive, and part of the attraction - which was really something else.

In addition to seeing my supervisor in the buff -- well, fear kept me from looking right at him -- a Hungarian twenty-something rather bravely tried to give me the eye despite the fact that I was foreign, talking to another foreigner in foreign, and about 30 °C too far over my own body temperature to even want to contemplate contemplating getting any sweatier. I quietly flashed him an appreciative grin with "No" written all over it, knowing full well that I wouldn't have gone there whatever the situation. In any case, his swimming trunks offended me, which is just as well, and though there were a good sixty naked blokes running around the place, one looking like a younger, hunkier Vladimir Putin, hung like a dinosaur, that was as gay as it got.

More excitingly, they had the most powerful wave pool I've ever been in; elegantly surrounded by white stone balustrades and little renaissance statuettes, this incongruous pool of mammoth waves and crazy breakers had a unifying effect on all present. We stopped, if only for a moment, to watch and smile as our supervisor turned into a ten year old and threw himself into the foam, grinning like a kid; I plan to be that sprightly at fifty.

Thereafter, pretty much everybody left for the U.K., leaving Huey (my friend and colleague) and myself to explore all corners of the city on foot for an extra night and day. We visited; the parliament, purportedly inspired by the Palace of Westminster; Pest's huge and very tasty indoor market, where I wanted to steal most of the vegetables on display and smear myself with the local patisserie; Vajdahunyad Castle, which was surrounded by ducks, and an extraordinarily high incidence of nookie (I've never seen so many people making out as I did in Budapest as a whole); another bath house, Széchenzyi, which was rather pretty and a cheering respite from the tiring heat outside; a Japanese-style vegan restaurant, Wabisabi, because we just had to after four days of meat and pickled vegetable for four days in a row. Here, I encountered rooibos tea, a South African export that I've been drinking almost every day since I got back to the UK (right now, in fact!).

Our last few hours were spent at the Buda Royal Palace, which sits atop a hill accessible by funicular or on foot (we chose lazy and novel over energetic and commonplace, though it incurred a small fee). Up here, we sought shelter from the heat beneath a huge bronze statue of a horse and rider, sitting on its highly photographed limestone plinth and ruining everybody's pictures whilst admiring the fine views, our collection of fetish shots, and the travesties that some people elect to visit upon themselves.

After a few hours of sunning our toes, it was off to the airport; this journey we decided to make via metro and bus, and for a total of about ninety pence each, it was far better value than the ten quid taxis with the upside of a little extra adventure. I even saw my sister along the way, which was unexpected. At this point, Huey reveals to me that she is a closeted Taiwanese princess, and somehow manages to get us into the first class lounge for free drinks, food and internet before our flight back to the British sunshine. Budapest was memorable.

Today's entry comes to you as an audio file (238 kb). Low bandwidth users will inevitably feel cheated at the long wait for a lot of nothing, so the text, pretty much as it's spoken, can be read if you click below (otherwise there's really no point).

Some funny things come through my mail box. I don't mean funny ha-ha, the kinds of things that wither and die under the scrutiny of the average dry or verging-on-non-existent sense of humour, but quirky. Which is why I was pleasantly mortified at receiving this absolutley spot-on (I wish) analysis of my MRI from him. By way of reassurance, and thank you for the concern, the scan was merely a common case of "student whoring his goods for money." They needed uncommonly stupid people to lie-in for an hour and a half, and rewarded said deficients with a cup of water and thirty two quid. Yes, £32, which is a little higher than minimum wage.

In other news, work was a non-event today as it was the members' day at the Chelsea Flower Show. Serving Pimms, strawberries, concept gardens and spectacular plants to the green-fingered and nouveau-riche for the 82nd time since 1862, Chelsea is easily the most famous home and garden show on the planet, and this year attracted 157 000 visitors. I didn't have time to meet them all, but did bump into four or five people I knew from London -- which was nice, and not unsurprising since all the gay people who weren't on Compton Street at lunch time seemed to be in the show grounds, flapping their wrists at gargantuan Begonias and specimen orchids -- whilst taking in general gorgeousness and good atmosphere over the course of a largely sunny and warm afternoon.

General gorgeousness and good atmosphere plus mum and partners in crime And my reflection

Now back in Cambridge, my feet are comfortably sore, and I have a mammoth strawberry plant sitting in the bay window; one of the exhibitors sold the plant to us then and there, which is utterly illegal since plants can only be removed from the show during the big sell-off that occurs on the last day; I was rather chuffed.

Today's lessons are that smiles are powerful, strawberry juice makes for convincing pavement blood, and bin bags can hide more than just body parts.

Exactly one month ago, I was lying stock still in a resonance chamber while a muffled sledgehammer went off inside my head; that's pretty much all that summarises an MRI. That, and the mild disorientation that comes from lying in a tube that is little larger than the diameter of your head for an hour and a half while magnets and motors noisily do the rounds about your grey matter. You're expected not to move; wiggling the toes is enough to cause movement of the head, so developing an itch, or the inevitable pins and needles, isn't exactly convenient. Like most people, I developed both, but once all feeling was lost in my legs, things became significantly simpler.

And now I have my results back... no abnormalities, just unusually large frontal lobes, which is nature's way of telling me that I can neither be blamed for talking too much, nor be faulted for trying to restore my own brand of order to the immediate Universe. It's nice to have an excuse for being anal.

It's a little humbling to see that all that I am is what is represented above; a mass of tissue that obeys a set of rules imposed by some biological imperative, but whose plasticity in size, shape and operation is sufficiently free as to give rise to all the unique personalities with which we interact.
Is that marvelous, or is that marvelous?