Spring Break!

The quarter is over! The sun is shining! My room needs cleaning!

There are new gifs up on my tumblr. I will be continuing this project next quarter as well.

I will start work on my rocky horror comic this week, as it is due before April 22. I will be trying to sell it at SPACE in Columbus then. It has also become an honors project... so there's that...

WHAT I AM READING:

Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf
The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot
Lifting Belly by Gertrude Stein
Orality and Literacy by Walter J. Ong
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Also, guys! Ladies! People who don't fall in either of those categories! The Denton Affair will be doing a shadowcast performance of The Big Lebowski on March 24th at the Esquire! The tickets are going fast, there's information on the website about how to purchase them! Go go go!

Photo of the day:

Some dapper DAAPers at the Refresh this Page opening a while ago.

Hetero-Types: Electron Microscope Tour

I'm late with this, it happened over a week ago, but... the tour with the Hetero-Types show to the Engineering Research Center's scanning electron microscope went really well! It was David Rosenthal, Laura Fisher, a couple other photographers from DAAP, and me. Dr. Rosales and his graduate assistant Manna were very accommodating with us, they didn't even mind us yelling "TAKE THAT PICTURE" every few seconds.

The best part for me, though, was helping Dr. Rosales prepare the samples. In order to be properly viewed by a scanning electron microscope, samples must be conductive--in this case, coated with a gold-palladium alloy. Samples were cut down, affixed to carbon tape, and placed in a vacuum chamber. Electricity was run through the gold-palladium, which caused it to vaporize and settle on the samples (it also glowed purple, which was cool to see).When I was smaller I had a kid's microscope, complete with slides, and I got rather good at putting together various organic and inorganic slides. So I really enjoyed putting on gloves and cutting little finicky bits of things and using tweezers to settle them just so on the dime-sized sample holders.

Actually viewing them in the microscope was something else, though. One of the samples was a fresh leaf from my creeping charlie houseplant. The leaf was fresh enough to still retain water--which made it more vulnerable to disintegration.The higher the magnification, the more focused the beam of electrons becomes. If the sample is improperly coated, or if it retains too much water, it will start to disintegrate. Which is what happened here.

The other samples were: a housefly, a lacewing fly, the inside of a seed pod, a gingko leaf and a butterfly wing.

This is (presumably) pollen, caught on a fly's back.

Flies are hairy, hairy bugs.

Closeup of a gingko leaf.

Scales of a butterfly wing.

Broken scale on a butterfly wing.

The spongy inside of a seed pod.

All the magnifications are specified on the images. These are not all the images, just the ones I liked best. All 26 can be viewed on my Photobucket account if you want to see more.

What I did on the Net today... so far.

Since I just woke up (and consequently slept through a Japanese test, heh), I've only had time to check my email, facebook, google plus, and tumblr (briefly). I'm currently flipping through all the pages of fyeahartnewbieowl.tumblr.com, and finding (happily) that I stopped doing most of the things mentioned in Junior High.

I did gchat with my dad (who is in Sweden) and my boyfriend (who is at work and bored). In English class last week, I heard one of the sophomore girls sitting behind me talk about how "nerdy" or "geeky" it was to chat on gchat, and I really wanted to turn around and ask her why. Instead, I opened my laptop and g-chatted with my boyfriend until the professor came in. How is gchat nerdier than facebook chat? What are the ranking hierarchies of nerdiness in chat programs? Where does AOL and chatroulette fall on the scale? Interesting. Maybe I'll make an online survey and ask people to rank chat programs from nerdy to totally hip.

Also, my English class (to quote Jillian Tamaki's Skim) is a goldfish tank of stupid.