I feel the earth move under my feet...
Yesterday at 6 PM there was a very minor earthquake in Portland. I was in the chemistry building at the time, and heard a bit of a rumble and all the ceiling tiles shook. My first instinct, after realizing that, no, the wind doesn't shake huge buildings like it does my house, was to get the hell out of there, but I decided to see if Brian, who I'd been talking to a minute earlier, was still around or had heard/felt it.
Brian and I were apparently the only people around; we debated whether it had been an earthquake (since the ceiling had shaken, but the floor's shaking was imperceptible) or an explosion in one of the biochemistry labs on the fourth floor. When we went upstairs to investigate, though, nobody was in any of the labs and all the lights were off, so we went over to Community Safety to find out if they had felt it, or if not, if they could please come over and look around. The dispatcher hadn't felt it, so I went on my merry way (I'd been on my way out anyway) and Brian went back to the building, promising to leave if it happened again.
I got home to a chorus of my roommates shouting, "Jenn! We had an earthquake!" They hadn't felt it, though, which was weird because it had only been twenty minutes since it had happened at this point--but the internet was already abuzz. I called the dispatcher and he said, "Google said there was an earthquake!" Oh, internet. You tell us all.
I started to get mildly annoyed that this had happened during my third attempt to get a scan of a certain sample of mine for my thesis. See, this scan would tell me if my results were at all reproducible. The machine is very carefully aligned, so an earthquake woul theoretically throw it off. The last two times I tried to run this scan, something weird happened once and the power went out the second time. I've been waiting for these results since early December, with considerable trepidation--if my pattern were significantly different from the last time I made this stuff it would mean basically all of my science was crap, and I'd have to spend the rest of the year trying to figure out how to make it at all reliable, rather than working on the problem at hand. I had considerable reason to doubt that I was coming up with reliably reproducible results, too, which I won't get into because it's even more boring than this is.
I went back an hour later to check on the pattern anyway, convinced the earthquake would have messed up my scan. It hadn't, however, and my powder pattern was there--and, at least upon first inspection, totally identical to the one for the same sample made earlier this year. Yes! Yes yes yes!
It's the small victories that really count. Especially when you don't know if you are going to win them.
Brian and I were apparently the only people around; we debated whether it had been an earthquake (since the ceiling had shaken, but the floor's shaking was imperceptible) or an explosion in one of the biochemistry labs on the fourth floor. When we went upstairs to investigate, though, nobody was in any of the labs and all the lights were off, so we went over to Community Safety to find out if they had felt it, or if not, if they could please come over and look around. The dispatcher hadn't felt it, so I went on my merry way (I'd been on my way out anyway) and Brian went back to the building, promising to leave if it happened again.
I got home to a chorus of my roommates shouting, "Jenn! We had an earthquake!" They hadn't felt it, though, which was weird because it had only been twenty minutes since it had happened at this point--but the internet was already abuzz. I called the dispatcher and he said, "Google said there was an earthquake!" Oh, internet. You tell us all.
I started to get mildly annoyed that this had happened during my third attempt to get a scan of a certain sample of mine for my thesis. See, this scan would tell me if my results were at all reproducible. The machine is very carefully aligned, so an earthquake woul theoretically throw it off. The last two times I tried to run this scan, something weird happened once and the power went out the second time. I've been waiting for these results since early December, with considerable trepidation--if my pattern were significantly different from the last time I made this stuff it would mean basically all of my science was crap, and I'd have to spend the rest of the year trying to figure out how to make it at all reliable, rather than working on the problem at hand. I had considerable reason to doubt that I was coming up with reliably reproducible results, too, which I won't get into because it's even more boring than this is.
I went back an hour later to check on the pattern anyway, convinced the earthquake would have messed up my scan. It hadn't, however, and my powder pattern was there--and, at least upon first inspection, totally identical to the one for the same sample made earlier this year. Yes! Yes yes yes!
It's the small victories that really count. Especially when you don't know if you are going to win them.
posted by Jenn at 1/29/2006 08:50:00 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home