Mushroom time lapse

The box had to sit in the dark for three months for the mycelium to form inside the black plastic, but once released, the mushrooms grew to edible size in just over a week!

Here's what they looked like just before harvest:

20250411_070409

(You may have to click the top image through to Flickr to view the time lapse video. For some reason the YouTube version uploaded as a short and I can't work out how to get to the embed code.)
[This is cross-posted from the Dreamwidth community [community profile] threeforthememories, which is great and you should all join it. You have until next Monday 24 January if you want to post three photos to it that define your year last year, and no time constraints on enjoying everyone else's posts. I think it might actually be years since I've either promoted a community or cross-posted from one. Yikes.]

  1. Telstar (RIP)
    IMG_5821
    This is - was - our beloved cat Telstar, just before he turned twelve in June of last year. We had no idea that we only had a few months left with him at this point, as his decline was very sudden. Losing him is an event that will forever be associated with 2021.


  2. ”+2” )

This morning, I did an undergraduate viva, in physics, with another lecturer (Professor level), and a fourth-year masters student.

Both assessors are women. Student is a woman. I think this may well be the very first professional assessment experience I have had in my entire working career where everyone involved was a woman AND it *wasn't* some sort of "Women in STEM" event.

And then this afternoon,[livejournal.com profile] cha_mel_eon made her first official Artist-in-Residence visit to my department, and I got to show her cool pieces of kit and bits of metal, and we talked about space and art and it was absolutely lovely.

It were a good day. :)

I'm not usually a fan of the articles contributed by members of the academic community to the esteemed publication Nature, but this one really pissed me off.

"Design your own doctoral project" by Jesko Becker.

I warn you, take a deep breath and brace yourself for an onslaught of unabashed, tone-deaf horseshit if you decide to click that link. Reading it made me want to scream. A lot. Because so very few people in the world are in a position to spend months or years, as this author clearly did, doing a vast amount of unpaid labour in order to cook up a doctoral project and then chasing funding for it. You have to already be nicely sorted out for that. This aspirational bullshit is exactly the kind of thing that puts off less privileged members of the academic community (which, M. Becker, is 99.999999% of them) from pursuing doctoral work in the first place, or makes them feel like failures when they can't complete it. Doctoral work is already very badly paid, and even if you are lucky enough to land a funded position, the funding is almost always insufficient to cover the actual duration of projects. Nearly everyone with a PhD that I have ever met in the UK worked at least a couple of months on their doctoral theses without pay. It is an absolutely shite system and it is not to be encouraged. So don't go telling people, "You don't need funding, just follow your dreaaaaams!" People have to pay rent. They have to eat. Some of them have families to care for. They need money to do those things.

It doesn't just take "autonomy, determination and perseverance" to make an unfunded doctoral project happen. It takes MONEY, and not just money for the project. YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM, M. Becker. You are not the solution. Bugger Off.
nanila: me (Default)
( Sep. 19th, 2019 10:44 pm)
20190919_185053
Today I was in London where, amongst other things, I hung out with my old labmates and watched the sunset. This was taken from the first desk I worked at in the lab when I started there in 2006. Sitting in front of those monitors brought back so many memories, all of them rose-tinted because I was so happy for such a very long time.
For the past 3-4 years, the bloke has been traveling to cities around the world as part of his air quality/particulate monitoring work. He’s often been accompanied by Robin Price, physicist and visual artist, who makes pollution paintings with a portable sensor setup. The Arts Council recently purchased the “Air of the Anthropocene” collection, and today The Guardian newspaper ran a piece about his work. Sadly, the prettier the photos are, the dirtier the air is!

Robin Price - Dehli playground
Robin Price - Dehli Playground light painting

You can view the collection here.
tags:
To kick off this eleventh twelfth of a weariness, I bring you the Sun, an object of which we can expect to see very little in the UK during the month of November.

Humuhumu and I spent well over an hour in the Science Museum exhibition “The Sun: Living with Our Star”. She enjoyed all the objects in the exhibit, but particularly the hands-on things, like reading different types of sundial, and seeing how much solar power she could generate using a set of rotatable mirrors (see below).

20181030_134007
Humuhumu maximising her solar power generation.

Words and pictures )

Last but not least, we were very excited to see one of Mummy’s work colleagues in a video in the exhibition!

20181030_135937
Helen in the lab, pretending to do something important with a bunch of cables. Or maybe she’s not pretending - she is wearing a grounding strap! :D Anyway, she’s saying, “I have touched this object and now it’s going to go up into space.” Which is a pretty cool thing to be able to say.

+3 )

This is only a small and highly personal sampling of the objects, activities and videos on display. We enjoyed them all, and it was well worth the £15 price of admission (for me; children 16 and under go free). Do go, if you can! It’s on through early May of next year.
20180925_132221

My soon-to-be-retired line manager brought me a final crop of Cassini memorabilia. Pictured are badges, produced by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, commemorating the following events along Cassini’s journey to Saturn:

  1. The first Venus flyby (April 26, 1998)
  2. The second Venus flyby (June 24, 1999)
  3. Earth swingby (August 18, 1999)
  4. The Jupiter flyby (December 30, 2000)


The lithograph is of some very old promotional artwork, also produced by JPL.
Today my boss ambled in and dropped another load of Space History on my desk. This included a bunch of photographs of Cassini flight hardware (subject of a future post), but also three photos of Ulysses hardware, which is even older.

The Ulysses spacecraft, which is still in orbit although decommissioned and not operational, remains one of the few spacecraft to leave the ecliptic plane of the solar system to a significant degree. It studied the poles of the Sun. It launched in 1990, and the total mission duration was over eighteen years.

We estimate these photos are from the early 1980s. They're of the flight hardware for the magnetometer, which now drifts quietly with the rest of the silent spacecraft, between Jupiter and the Sun.

20180912_184143
[Ulysses magnetometer sensor head]

20180912_184115
[Ulysses magnetometer electronics box]

20180912_184156_001
[Topside view of one of the Ulysses magnetometer flight boards. Look at all those beautifully hand-soldered through-hole components!]
My boss and I have begun the sad task of sorting through and either saving, re-purposing, or throwing out thirty-odd years of accumulated Cassini information. Today I found these newspaper clippings on my desk. He discovered them last night and thought I’d want them. He was right.

20180829_172229
From The Orlando Sentinel, 16 October 1997. “Next stop for Cassini: Saturn: Probe’s long journey will keep scientists and critics waiting”

+4 )

I didn’t know Cassini’s launch had attracted protesters due to its plutonium power source. Their signs...! “I don’t want to glow in the dark” is my favourite. I also wonder who sent these clippings to the MAG team, or if my boss had collected them himself. Must remember to ask him when he’s in next.

On a less sad note, here is an item that has been re-purposed! This is a mu-metal can, used to test magnetic field sensors. It isolates the sensor from the Earth’s magnetic field, so the sensor can be calibrated. This can was used when Cassini was being built, to test the Vector Helium Magnetometer (VHM). We will now use it in the lab to test the JUICE magnetometer sensors.

20180829_135843
Mu metal can has a rather spiffy casing and even a handle to make it easy to carry (they’re heavy!). My feet included in the photo for scale.

+1 )
.