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kaberettThree things from vass for me to write about. You are welcome to ask me to give you three things you may or may not know or care about to write about, but I do not guarantee to give you prompts in a timely fashion.
Shells: my mother's favourite, of the ones that show up on the beach down in Cornwall, are the blue-rayed limpet, generally very small and very delicate, with bright blue, almost metallic stripes. It turns out these are an example of structural colour (Nature paper).
Also very common down around those parts are banded snails, of which I am extremely fond. What I hadn't realised until just now is that they mostly don't eat living foliage, apparently? So hurrah also for that.
My other principal association with shells, at the moment, is the rescue chickens kept by a couple who live just around the corner from the allotment. They're free-range in the back garden, and there's unsurprisingly a lot more variability in size, colour, and shell thickness than one tends to find in supermarkets. In general, from these hens, lighter shells are thinner. I'm gradually getting the hang of how gentle to be with them when breaking them.
Online public access catalogues: honestly my main and immediate feeling on this topic is ongoing shakes-fist-at-clouds about the University of Cambridge's redesign of its online catalogue, which has made a lot of people very angry and been widely considered a bad idea.
The one I've most recently used in anger is the NHM's data portal; I was hoping they'd have some more detail on some rocks I've been working on, but alas they do not. (Specifically, I've been working with the powders, and I'm interested in the petrography of whole rock samples -- that is, which minerals were present prior to crushing, and in roughly what proportions.)
I do also use the catalogue for my local library, intermittently, but probably the one that's annoyed me least recently is the BL's.
So: I use them a fair bit, for a variety of materials, and am generally in favour. My opinions on architecture and interface are more towards the "I know what I hate when I see it" end of the spectrum than the "informed opinion" one.
Bleach: needs keeping in the fridge in a dark-coloured bottle if you want to use it as a reagent, clearly labelled with the date it was opened, because good grief does that stuff like reacting with The Air.
Bleach isn't, thankfully, one of the chemicals I'm convinced is Nasty and also Dangerous. I am pretty relaxed about using it; I do wear gloves when I'm doing A's hair, but that's about the extent of my concern. A's hair is in fact where I most frequently use it these days: it's more relevant to organic chemistry than the stuff I'm doing currently, on the whole, and I've definitely not used it in anger at work since before I started the PhD.
(It also goes down the loo once a week: we are a household of autistics, so A does bedtime things first, and I use the bathroom last; on Sunday nights the loo gets bleached. And then in the mornings A uses the bathroom first - again - which means that I don't have to think about it any further, for which I am particularly grateful because The Next Step involves The Toilet Brush, which is Nasty and also Dangerous. All I gotta do is leave the bleach bottle on the closed lid of the toilet, this being a habit I acquired from A, and then by the time I stagger out of bed on Monday morning it has vanished again as if 'twere never there.)
vass for me to write about. You are welcome to ask me to give you three things you may or may not know or care about to write about, but I do not guarantee to give you prompts in a timely fashion.Shells: my mother's favourite, of the ones that show up on the beach down in Cornwall, are the blue-rayed limpet, generally very small and very delicate, with bright blue, almost metallic stripes. It turns out these are an example of structural colour (Nature paper).
Also very common down around those parts are banded snails, of which I am extremely fond. What I hadn't realised until just now is that they mostly don't eat living foliage, apparently? So hurrah also for that.
My other principal association with shells, at the moment, is the rescue chickens kept by a couple who live just around the corner from the allotment. They're free-range in the back garden, and there's unsurprisingly a lot more variability in size, colour, and shell thickness than one tends to find in supermarkets. In general, from these hens, lighter shells are thinner. I'm gradually getting the hang of how gentle to be with them when breaking them.
Online public access catalogues: honestly my main and immediate feeling on this topic is ongoing shakes-fist-at-clouds about the University of Cambridge's redesign of its online catalogue, which has made a lot of people very angry and been widely considered a bad idea.
The one I've most recently used in anger is the NHM's data portal; I was hoping they'd have some more detail on some rocks I've been working on, but alas they do not. (Specifically, I've been working with the powders, and I'm interested in the petrography of whole rock samples -- that is, which minerals were present prior to crushing, and in roughly what proportions.)
I do also use the catalogue for my local library, intermittently, but probably the one that's annoyed me least recently is the BL's.
So: I use them a fair bit, for a variety of materials, and am generally in favour. My opinions on architecture and interface are more towards the "I know what I hate when I see it" end of the spectrum than the "informed opinion" one.
Bleach: needs keeping in the fridge in a dark-coloured bottle if you want to use it as a reagent, clearly labelled with the date it was opened, because good grief does that stuff like reacting with The Air.
Bleach isn't, thankfully, one of the chemicals I'm convinced is Nasty and also Dangerous. I am pretty relaxed about using it; I do wear gloves when I'm doing A's hair, but that's about the extent of my concern. A's hair is in fact where I most frequently use it these days: it's more relevant to organic chemistry than the stuff I'm doing currently, on the whole, and I've definitely not used it in anger at work since before I started the PhD.
(It also goes down the loo once a week: we are a household of autistics, so A does bedtime things first, and I use the bathroom last; on Sunday nights the loo gets bleached. And then in the mornings A uses the bathroom first - again - which means that I don't have to think about it any further, for which I am particularly grateful because The Next Step involves The Toilet Brush, which is Nasty and also Dangerous. All I gotta do is leave the bleach bottle on the closed lid of the toilet, this being a habit I acquired from A, and then by the time I stagger out of bed on Monday morning it has vanished again as if 'twere never there.)
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Date: 2019-06-15 08:37 pm (UTC)I'd quite like three things to witter about, no rush.
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Date: 2019-06-15 09:22 pm (UTC)Structural colour, bananas, glass.
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Date: 2019-06-18 05:49 pm (UTC)Thanks!
Date: 2019-07-11 08:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-16 01:17 am (UTC)The way you describe the household routines makes me think a little bit of fairies doing things while you're not looking.
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Date: 2019-06-18 05:50 pm (UTC)(Like: actively working on saying "hey, I did the thing, give me praise" to one another, and trying to notice & thank without that prompt when possible, etc.)
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Date: 2019-06-27 06:07 am (UTC)This is a wonderful thing. It's also something we're working on in my household, but have a long way to go.
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Date: 2019-06-27 05:02 pm (UTC)<3
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Date: 2019-07-07 05:23 pm (UTC)I think "may not have an opinion about" is sort of the point of the meme! I enjoyed your answers :-)
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Date: 2019-06-16 03:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2019-06-16 07:47 am (UTC)I'm delighted to learn that banded snails mostly don't eat living foliage. I try not to crush them already, and like the trails they leave, but I'm really glad they're not the ones chomping on my plants. *shakes fist at possums*
My opinions on architecture and interface are more towards the "I know what I hate when I see it" end of the spectrum than the "informed opinion" one.
I can relate.
Chickens! <3
A's hair is in fact where I most frequently use it these days
That's where the thought came from - that and a Tumblr post of a man with very rainbow hair.
I would like three more things when you have time to think of them, please.
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Date: 2019-06-18 05:57 pm (UTC)Taking photos of A's hair at a point when it's been recently dyed & buzzed (& I'm not too sulky about having cocked up the yellow) is On My To Blog List.
THREE MORE THINGS: nightshades, stars, ebooks.
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Date: 2019-06-20 07:46 pm (UTC)OKAY SO the backstory here is that I am completely and 100% relaxed about working with liquid HF. I do it for my day job. It's fine. It's not a problem. Sure, it could actually kill me, but I'd have to screw up about five different things at once without noticing in order for that to happen, so it won't, so it's just... fine.
On the other hand, I am stubbornly Afraid Of sodium hydroxide.
I'd probably be fine with it in a lab setting, even! It's just that in a domestic setting I... was told as a small child that it was Nasty and Dangerous and I Wasn't To Touch It because It Would Turn Me Into Soap, and was never taught otherwise, which means that when I'm not wearing a lab coat and I'm not in a room with positive pressure-air flow and I'm using flimsy domestic-use nitriles rather than Actual Lab ones...
... I sort of shut down and refuse to have anything to do with the stuff, because, on top of everything else, BAR SOAP IS A BAD TEXTURE and also NO.
I should probably, at some point, sit down and read the MSDS in a bit more detail, and then read actual competent advice-for-chemists on safety protocols in domestic applications, but yes, there you go, that is the context.
I have no similar superstitions about any form of bleach. :)
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Date: 2019-06-20 08:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-25 09:20 pm (UTC)I have struggled with some toxicophobia in the past, and a bottle of muriatic acid someone intended to use on rocks kinda set me off HCl in the household. I'm probably also a little wary of lye in the house and yet I've used NaOH in gen chem lab in college without really having an issue.
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