So how about something not about the girl?

Yeah, I think I'm even reaching my limit on how much I can go on about her...ok, maybe not, but I know my audience...except for those who read this that I do not know, which seems to be a growing number...alright, so now I have no idea who reads this and I'm starting to get paranoid, as long as I don't see more people from the DoD or the RAND Corporation checking the blog I won't get to paranoid (but it has happened).

In the world of my research things seem to be moving along quite well. After not being able to get a glue to stick to itself I have finally managed to get it to do just that, and in the process hold pieces of glass together as well. So this afternoon I will see if in doing so I managed to plug up the channels that I had made in the glass or if I have actually succeeded in doing something useful.

I hope that the later is the case, if only for my own safety. See as I have mentioned before the nanofab isn't really a safe place. Unlike my neighbourhood which may not be the safest place either the nanofab is full of hidden and unexpected dangers. I mean the guy hanging out on the corner at 2:00 am is probably not the nicest person in town, so it's easy enough to avoid him. The people in the lab however are just carelessly dangerous. Such as Monday, when one particularly brilliant individual (I assume he's an engineer, most people in there are), decided to leave 4 liter bottle of concentrated hydrogen peroxide (twice the concentration of what is used to bleach hair, 10 times as strong as the disinfectant for cuts) sitting on the floor. Oh, this was directly in front of the wet bench were we work with such friendly chemicals as hydrofluoric acid. So this bottle is not only a spill hazard, but it could trip you if you were moving a beaker of acid and watching it, to be sure not to spill. But this particular idiot also left the tap running for the distilled water (expensive purified water) running for minutes, even though he only used about 50 milliliters (10 seconds worth of water) can you just feel the respect I have for him?

It seriously worries me to go over there to do work, particularly around the chemicals. In large part because I doubt that the engineers clean up any spills they make and everything seems to be done in as dangerous a fashion as possible. Which is really funny coming from me, since I have a tendency to skirt safety issues frequently (i.e. drinking coke in the labs, wearing sandals and shorts...) though these are all relatively minor things, they do have some risk involved. Yet when dealing with things like making a piranha solution (concentrated sulfuric acid and concentrated hydrogen peroxide) I take plenty of precautions. You see when you mix these two acids there is a lot of heat given off, enough so that the solution can actually start to boil if it is mixed too fast (pure sulfuric acid boils at 337 C, hydrogen peroxide at 141 C!). So any time a solution can boil itself it risks boiling over, and possibly spitting...a solution of very corrosive acid spitting out of it's beaker is not something I ever want to see. Yet I guess it happened recently, because when I was in the nanofab today I was the results. A beaker was sitting there with it's label nearly completely blackened from being attacked by the piranha solution. From the looks of it, whoever made this solution added things way too fast, such that the piranha solution boiled over the top of the beaker! Seriously, how stupid do you have to be to do this! Because this is not the first time I have seen something like that, don't these people think?

I guess this would explain all the holes/patches and discolourations on the bunny suits that we have to wear. In all my years of doing chemistry I only burnt myself once. My hand hit the tip of an auto dispenser of concentrated acetic acid (really really concentrated vinegar) and a drop got on my skin. It wasn't bad, I washed it right away, but the point is that in about 12 years of doing chemistry I have only had one instance where I got a chemical on me in any dangerous fashion. I truly doubt that the engineers working in the nanofab can say the same thing. Hopefully they will learn to be safer, but I doubt it. I guess unlike a chemistry lab, I will have to keep an eye on everyone around me if I want to stay safe. Funny, it's starting to sound a lot more like being in a rough neighbourhood, who would have thought that a bunch of engineers could be so dangerous?