Week 20 - Rubber

Well, week 20 has come and gone, and here we are in the new year. When it dawned on me that week 20 really had passed, I decided it might be good to look back at what I've actually accomplished towards my degree.  Hopefully I'm not just wasting months of my life doing miniscule busy-tasks around here, and worse yet I hope that when this is over my biggest accomplishment isn't this blog. No offense, but I am trying to get a Ph.D. here.

In August I started working with the fermenters. Tim in our lab, who behaves similarly to and intellectually rivals Sheldon on the Big Bang Theory, calls the fermenters a "crying baby" for which there is always something wrong. I wish I could argue this but he is more experiences and more often right. In this case they have been troublesome at best, and I have been dodging from one dilemma to the next, until here I am 20 weeks later and I have a vague idea of the research I will do, but yet no capacity to complete it yet. Hopefully soon it will be as easy as popping pastries in the toaster but my current pursuit is a new set of rubber o-rings for the lids. So let me tell you what I've learned about rubber the past few days. So much time is spent on the methods to spend so few days doing actual research.

Rubber does not just refer to the original substance anymore, but within the industry can refer to many conglomerates of substances. There are probably a few hundred "rubber engineers" out there whose primary specialties is to figure out the next modification which can lead to new behavior qualities of the materials. And for this they deserve an award, for patience if for nothing else. For the debutant, I've included an informational link with Apple Rubber. This is a great page for getting you information on all the commercially available types of rubber materials, their weaknesses, strengths and common purposes. Very instructional. Then comes the sizing, as in my case I need an O-ring. Well, they have a sizing guide as well, and 35 pages of text for all available dimensions. Quite an adventure. And don't forget to over estimate the size of the ring, there's a good chance it might shrink just a bit. That's the part I'm currently nervous about, because my jar has an internal diameter of 115 mm from center to center of the ring. However, they need from inner edge to inner edge, and this is about... 110 mm. But then to undershoot a touch, I need 108 mm. I hope...

Betsy, cozy in front of the fire.

Betsy is cute as ever, and for official judgement, I submit exhibit 345: Betsy wrapped in a fleece by our crackling fire as she tries to stay warm. Yes, this picture was posed, but she loved every minute of it and really was laying down in front of the hearth. However, to make the picture more compelling, I needed those cute eyes looking up at the camera and her face more easily seen in front of the fireplace. I ask myself every day how someone could give her up twice. What a wonderful dog.

Greedy company of the week: Tompkins Rubber. If you google anything to do with rubber stoppers, or other lab equipment rubber parts, they have bought every rubber part ".com" there is. Funny, because their website is extremely unhelpful and pointless.

Word of the week: Speaking of pointless, the TORUS is a circle revolved in a circular pattern. Wikipedia is quite thorough: Torus. Fun shape, and at the top of my "must use" list for "Words with Friends".