I just got an ad for something with “WINDOWMAKER™” across the top and I naturally first read that as widowmaker, but no, it’s a device for burning the polyimide coating off of fused silca tubing to make an optical window for caplilary electrophoresis purposes, and lower in the text where they are not shouting it’s rendered more readably as “The Window Maker™”
“Make detection windows for CE easily!” Marketing for science stuff is hilarious.
I ended up driving from Chicago to Milwaukee around sunset on July 4, here in the USA. Fireworks night! Was sort of cool seeing fireworks off in the greater or lesser distance while driving. I did see a pretty big burst behind a water tower so the Water Sphere shape silhouetted in front of fireworks, interesting thing to see. Weirdest thing was the sound. In a car on a highway at speed, windows closed, you can sometimes hear adjacent vehicles if they are making lounder than average sounds but rarely can you hear something happening Out Yonder There well off of the road, but fireworks are loud so yeah, kabooms left and right while on the highway.
I’ve been thinking about my recent week-long road trip with my girlfriend and the kiddo to Buffalo. That’s not the longest car trip I’ve ever done but it’s roughly tied for second longest. But the others were alone, this is the first time I’ve ever done a long drive with another driver, swapping drivers every hour-and-a-half to two hours. It’s a lot easier that way! And we’d talk with each other, or listen to podcasts and hit pause now and then to talk. It was really a surprisingly low-stress trip, long drives have gone fine in the past but this was really surprisingly easy.
We had a non-driving teen in the back, and long ago I was a kid in the back, but never on remotely as long a trip. Thinking back to some family vacations, I remember names of places and can look them up easily enough now, and they seemed like long trips to a little kid but they were closer to 200km. Depending on traffic and whatnot a bit over two hours, a bit less than three. It felt far as a little kid!
And now in COVID times to be able to do this with my family, bring the air filters to set up in the hotel rooms, respirators around people, eating outdoors together. I didn’t get to travel with anyone else much in the old days and to actually be able to now is fantastic.
This is the time of year when back pre-2020 I was going to WisCon and then the American Society for Mass Spectrometry conference. I’ve got old Facebook “Memories” posts from back then about traveling, and some gender exploration at both WisCon (safe place!) and ASMS (also weirdly went totally fine!). Some of my first really in-public experiences wearing skirts were at ASMS, my professional conference. I presented posters in my nicest skirt and Serious Professional Person top!
But I had thoughts about choosing clothing to travel in, trying to avoid attracting unwanted attention. It always felt weird to see others going through security at the airport wearing skirts, I was getting bolder but that felt way too much like asking for trouble to me! Or our carpool to ASMS in Indianapolis with a post-doc doing the driving choosing a plain little black dress for the drive since it was comfortable. I had similar dresses, I understood the comfort, but also we were going to be stopping in Indiana for lunch and bathroom breaks and that felt way too much like asking for trouble for me!
Now I just put 2280km on my car with my girlfriend and kiddo driving through Indiana and Ohio to New York. Choosing clothes for this first long trip since 2019 was an interesting feeling. Now I, too, am wearing dresses, that way I’ll be extremely inconspicuous in public restrooms! The whole trip was surprisingly comfortable, even though I’m getting used to life being more comfortable now. Just weird having all these memories while I was going about it.
The thing I’ve gradually figured out is something inside me always saw the women around me, the girls around me when I was young, as the other people like me, as my group. Early transition was emotionally weird in ways I didn’t understand then, because as much as I intellectually understood that the other women looked different from how I looked, and that (obviously) changed how things worked for them, emotionally, they were the other people like me and they all seemed impossibly bold.
Every time I see a road sign that says “Speed Hump” I think, dang, glad I’m a lesbian because generally lesbians are not like that…
My dream, naturally, is to develop an especially simple way to measure manganese and market it as ManganEasy!
(All my business ideas are really just puns)
When OpenAI’s sphincter-like logo became successful, it created a template that said, “This is what serious AI looks like.” Now, any new AI company that doesn’t resemble a colorful anatomical opening risks being seen as unserious or unprofessional.
Lots of people study reactive oxygen species. My dream, obviously, is to discover a proactive oxygen species.
We have a mentor/mentee seminar series. If I was in charge—and this is why they don’t put me in charge of things—we’d have a mentor/mentos/mentee/manatee seminar!
I saw a goofy joke about polyamory online and realized that being in a polycule means I always have several people I can share goofy polyamory jokes with!