(no subject)

When reading other people's journals, what accent do they have?

Everyone (except barrington, dsn and shnetti whose voices I hear often enough that I can 'hear' them all the time - sorry hawkida and gamemaker, haven't heard you recently enough!) speaks with a nice standard Australian accent, occasionally tempered by a slight UK and/or US twang (when you write slang, usually. And even then it ends up being mentally in Strine for me.)

Boy am I going to be suprised if I manage to meet people in real life. ;-)

(no subject)

Science is all about pretty colours.

I should know. There are large (2L) flasks filled with dye sitting up in the lab, along with some test tubes, some loose gels and a couple of odd lights.

Yes, we're taking photos to update the lab webpage.

I honestly think it would be easier just to get the photographer to come in when there are people around and take some general photographs. It would certainly be more honest than what we are ending up with.

So far we have: an RA looking down a microscope (I'm not sure if she bothered putting a slide on or not), the Bioinformatics person weighing out media (for the first time ever), a PhD student loading loading dye (well, what else?) onto a gel (which wasn't near a powerpack because that area was too dark and it photographed better near the windows), someone pippetting something that looked suspiciously like red dye and some protein gels. We couldn't find a sequencing gel (damn!) just to add to the stereotypes.

Oh, and everyone was in their lab coats (except the bioinformatics person who doesn't have one and borrowed mine for the day).

Shots they should probably have gotten which would have been more representative:

*Two RAs and one post-doc ordering cappuchinos at the coffee bar. Yes, we all buggered off after photo number 1.

*The bioinformatics person coming in and telling you that they've decided that where the exon boundaries were is wrong and they should be 3kb larger. So far it's happened twice - both times just after the oligos arrived.

*A PhD student sitting staring off into space after the computer with their unsaved changes to their thesis crashes.

*the lab meeting. 2 people asleep, 4 people arriving late (the clock in the tea room is 10 min slow), 1 lab head arriving, taking a mobile call and leaving a third of the way through again, 1/2 the lab looking blank because "it's the other project talking this week".

*A shot of anyone trying to deal with the building maintainence man. The look of sheer frustration would just be beautiful.

And what is the purpose of all this photography and webpage updating? To attract students.

I say offer them free beer. It's got to work at least as well as "hey, look at the pretty colours..."

Wanna be a scientist ? Helps if you're not colourblind... ;-)