Dr. Shellie

I love it when an image comes into focus. On a point-and-shoot camera, you hardly experience it at all– it’s too hard to see focus on that tiny LCD screen. On a digital SLR camera, there is a moment, but it is automated– fast and effortless. A whir of the lens, and everything sharpens. On an old, manual SLR you can get more of the feeling… slowly rotating the lens back and forth until each line becomes clean and clear. It’s similar on an optical microscope. But what I really love is SEM images. Back and forth, back and forth with the adjustment knobs, until you go from a grainy, black and white blur to a crisp greyscale image. Suddenly you can see what you couldn’t see before.

I am used to 90/10 gender ratios. However, in my yoga class it was 90/10 female to male, rather than the other way around! Next time I hear a male scientist complain that he can’t meet any women, I will send him to yoga.

Went to hand/arm therapist for repetitive strain injury today and got a set of stretches to do. The therapist advised to stretch to the point where I can feel the stretch but not to the point of pain. Makes much sense. I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to stretch when it hurt to do so. Answer: stretch a little. Hoping my arm will feel better soon.

Incidentally, the packet of information I got says that caffeine (as well as alchohol and nicotine) are deleterious to the healing process. So it looks like I have a head start on that one.

Trying a second experiment to go completely caffeine free… maybe I will also try to reduce simple sugars (cookies, pastry, etc.) in favor of protein (nuts? hard-boiled eggs?), fruits, etc. I am really curious to experiment for a week and see whether I feel any differently.

I went to a class today. It has been YEARS since I tried to take (or sit in) a class. This one looks very interesting and is related to the direction I want to go in for future research. In particular, it’s a lab class to teach familiarity with a class of equipment I want to use. It’s designed to get people used to the idea that experiments may not always work out the first time, and that you may not get what you expect from theory. We will probably spend a lot of time tweaking knobs and trying to figure out if equipment is broken. This will be a good experience for me. A nice feature of the class is that different lab groups meet different days of the week, and we are welcome to share data with the other groups as long as we acknowledge it in the lab report. I really like this philosophy. My memory of undergrad labs involved a lot of scrambling around trying to get presentable data by the end of class without much thinking about what was going on.