On Shaky Ground
Sep. 24th, 2011 05:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rebeccmeisterToday I am in the Goldwater Environmental Lab to run samples of ants and fungus in the Perkin-Elmer 2400 CHNS/O Analyzer (that's carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur, and oxygen, to you). I think I've described this previously as "tiny explosions" because this machine uses a combustion analysis procedure to determine elemental composition.
The lab is pretty quiet on the weekend, which is pretty good. The only thing is, I am noticing that something is causing the floor to vibrate. This, in turn, affects the readings of the microbalance that I am using to weigh out 2-mg samples with three decimal places of precision. It's tolerable for a little while, but the shaking is starting to seriously irritate me. I have to wonder - is it other machinery in the building? Something weird with the air-handling system? Are things just amplified because I'm up on the sixth floor?
Okay, okay. Back to trying to run samples.
The lab is pretty quiet on the weekend, which is pretty good. The only thing is, I am noticing that something is causing the floor to vibrate. This, in turn, affects the readings of the microbalance that I am using to weigh out 2-mg samples with three decimal places of precision. It's tolerable for a little while, but the shaking is starting to seriously irritate me. I have to wonder - is it other machinery in the building? Something weird with the air-handling system? Are things just amplified because I'm up on the sixth floor?
Okay, okay. Back to trying to run samples.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-25 02:13 pm (UTC)But in brighter news, today I made headway in a delicate assay that had been bamboozling me for a while. I hope you can say the same!
DM