More parallels between lab and the Soviet Navy

[meanfreepath]

2 more things:

We were venting the vacuum chamber with N2 as we needed to change an electrode (plain air has too much water vapor, which is very hard to pump out). Then we find the N2 bottle empty. It'll take a few days for another bottle to come in. If only I had checked the gauge a few days back...

There's also a broken chair in the office, which I don't usually sit in. But when our PI had to go over some stuff with us today, I took that chair, and before long, the seat separated from the body of the chair and I ended up on the floor. Wasn't hurt at all, but these things are just silly.

Comments

[obcordate.livejournal.com]

That's pretty funny. Soon the whole Physics department will fall apart and all machinery and dangerous materials it comprises will be sold on the black market to rogue physicists.

This is a bit off topic, but I like the word 同志. Maybe you know this already: 同志 used to be the direct translation for the Soviet term "comrade" back when Sino-Soviet relations were good. It was coined later as slang and is now the accepted translation for the English term "gay".

My friend satyadasa from NYU has this really old Mandarin course (tape and all) that was republished several times, but has not really been revised since 1950. It is a bit dated, but has a lot of funny sample phrases. All the non-Chinese people in the sample phrases are, of course, Soviet.

Really, I just felt like pasting characters. Yay for Unicode support!