Week 2. Avoid boredom.
There are two computers in the microscope room at my lab. One is for operating the microscope; the other is for chatting with friends.
Which makes me wonder why it is such a fancy, obviously expensive piece of equipment. Maybe it’s so I can open more gchat windows and tabs on Firefox. Cutting edge delinquency with the latest mathematical analysis software and algorithm libraries. Thank goodness for NSF funding.
If I were Tolstoy I still wouldn’t be able to do justice, with words, to the Sisyphean tedium of operating a microscope in a multipoint, time-lapse experiment. Move stage. Focus. Take picture. Click. Click. Click. Wait. Move stage. Repeat 16 times every 6-12 hours.
Then I discovered macros. If you’ve never worked with microscope software before, macros are a language for writing little programs to tell the scope what to do. If you’ve never programmed before, let me tell you, the feeling of power you get from writing macros is divine.
Not that I’ve put my newfound knowledge to any use. The power is theoretical, pure potentiality. That’s what makes it so powerful. I am the Creator! I can tell that scope to move to the right 5 micrometers and snap a photo in 5 different wavelengths. How powerful is that? Almost like throwing lightning, causing floods, or creating Man. If only that power and intention were also omnipotence. Because you see, in the real world, invariably the 5 micrometers are miscalculated, the shutter stays open too long, Man goes off the moment after creation, the ingrate that he is, and eats some fruit you told him not to touch, builds towers you really rather he not build, makes atom bombs and drops them on each other, and so on.
But do I give up? Did other Creators before me give up? Nein! If anything, that big screen filled with macro code is a perfect disguise for the 4 gchat windows directly under it. Alt-tab. Let there be (600nm fluorescent) light!
This is part two of my weekly summer research intern journal. I work in a systems biology lab at Harvard Medical School, where I try my best to not learn anything about science at all. Last week’s post is here.
i hear you comrade, i hear you.
(also, in the dark microscope room, with the lasers (495, 550, 647) all switched on, blinking of active IM windows and youtube videos blasting on the subwoofers, one starts to experience a certain sensory euphoria – or epilepsy)
I remember Alex’s house had all these nice computers because his dad would buy super awesome ones with NSF grants and then take the only sort of awesome ones home. It made me wish my dad was a high-powered research scientist.
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