An Unanticipated Day Off
Mar. 2nd, 2004 10:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catsittingstillHmm. Just a few days ago I said I was so busy at work I wasn't going to be able to post for a while.
Except that last week's protein prep didn't work out all that well--that is, it worked fine till the last concentration and desalting step, then the membrane that was supposed to let water and salt out of the sample while keeping the protein in broke and let the protein through after all.
Since you can't really see this protein when it's dissolved in water, there was no way to tell what had happened until the end of the run. At which point the filtrate from the final run (the extra water and salt--which also contained the protein, blast it) had been dumped in with the rest of the filtrate (at least I didn't throw it away completely) and all the concentration work had to be done again.
Fortunately Chris and To had come back at this point, and took over, because I had been working nine hours already, on not enough sleep from doing the break-the-cells-and-harvest-the-total-cell-protein steps of the day before, and was about at the end of my rope. They took over with the concentration and setting up crystallizations.
But dammit, after days of work, the protein didn't behave right at the end. It kept falling out of solution while they were trying to concentrate it--they lost about half of it that way--and the crystal setups don't look right.
So now Chris wants us to do it all over again. And I would have been going in about 6:00pm today to work until 1:00am or so, except that the cells aren't doubling as fast as they should and it's looking like harvest will be at 6:00am tomorrow instead. So I have the day off. But tomorrow is going to be grim--Chris wants us to go straight from the harvest-the-total-protein step to the purification, without taking a night off in between, which is the usual way we do things. That's going to take about 20 hours if everything goes well. Even with To taking over for a while in the middle, I don't know if I'm going to be able to do that. I guess we'll see.
So I have today off work. Aside from getting plenty of sleep, I'm hoping to write another one of the sidebars for the physics book, to go with the one I wrote on Sunday. That will probably take a couple of hours, actually--not the writing; it's only 200 words or so, but looking up the facts I need to verify. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a peregrine falcon's stooping speed? And I still don't know how far they drop. I should probably do some house chores. And I have a special command from myself to go out and find something fun to do today--maybe I'll go hiking despite the rain--to kind of store up some peace for tomorrow.
Except that last week's protein prep didn't work out all that well--that is, it worked fine till the last concentration and desalting step, then the membrane that was supposed to let water and salt out of the sample while keeping the protein in broke and let the protein through after all.
Since you can't really see this protein when it's dissolved in water, there was no way to tell what had happened until the end of the run. At which point the filtrate from the final run (the extra water and salt--which also contained the protein, blast it) had been dumped in with the rest of the filtrate (at least I didn't throw it away completely) and all the concentration work had to be done again.
Fortunately Chris and To had come back at this point, and took over, because I had been working nine hours already, on not enough sleep from doing the break-the-cells-and-harvest-the-total-cell-protein steps of the day before, and was about at the end of my rope. They took over with the concentration and setting up crystallizations.
But dammit, after days of work, the protein didn't behave right at the end. It kept falling out of solution while they were trying to concentrate it--they lost about half of it that way--and the crystal setups don't look right.
So now Chris wants us to do it all over again. And I would have been going in about 6:00pm today to work until 1:00am or so, except that the cells aren't doubling as fast as they should and it's looking like harvest will be at 6:00am tomorrow instead. So I have the day off. But tomorrow is going to be grim--Chris wants us to go straight from the harvest-the-total-protein step to the purification, without taking a night off in between, which is the usual way we do things. That's going to take about 20 hours if everything goes well. Even with To taking over for a while in the middle, I don't know if I'm going to be able to do that. I guess we'll see.
So I have today off work. Aside from getting plenty of sleep, I'm hoping to write another one of the sidebars for the physics book, to go with the one I wrote on Sunday. That will probably take a couple of hours, actually--not the writing; it's only 200 words or so, but looking up the facts I need to verify. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a peregrine falcon's stooping speed? And I still don't know how far they drop. I should probably do some house chores. And I have a special command from myself to go out and find something fun to do today--maybe I'll go hiking despite the rain--to kind of store up some peace for tomorrow.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-03-02 08:45 am (UTC)Hey, this is Dr. Seuss' 100th birthday! Why don't you go rhyming in the rain? :-)
Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a peregrine falcon's stooping speed? And I still don't know how far they drop.
Hmm ... I have a book called Comparisons that's not much help. Nothing about falcons, and it just has birds at straight flight: racing pigeon is about 60 mph (100 kph); the fastest is the spine-tailed swift which was reliably clocked at 106 mph (about 170 kph); but with claims of bursts to around 200 mph (about 300 kph).
The speed of a diving falcon would be limited by its coefficient of drag, resulting in a terminal velocity that would be the limit to its speed. The number quoted here as the Audubon Society's, 270 kph (about 180 mph) seems reasonable for a stoop, although the actual speed seems to be undergoing rather heroic scientific investigation by skydiving down along with the falcon.
I sure wouldn't want to be the investigator whose membrane (parachute) broke in these experiments! Wahooooooo!