Bus rides and research

So is it a good sign when you get on your bus and hear the driver asking one of the passengers to sit up front and help when he gets on the freeway? I have to admit I was tempted to wait for a later bus this morning when I heard that. But unlike the Thai dinner I had on Thursday night the ride was uneventful and I didn't lose six pounds over four days; I'm guessing nobody needs details on that one.

Recently I've been trying to figure out how I want to set up the lab space I'll be getting with my position this fall. It's a fun challenge but also one that carries a lot of burdens; anything that I mess up now I'll be stuck with for years unless I want to use the limited funds I have to redesign things. Though seeing as I've spent the better part of the past decade in one lab or another I should be able to come up with something halfway workable. So far the design that I have in mind is below, the empty wall will probably have more desks and book shelves.

I'm just glad that I ended up choosing to go into chemistry rather than math like I had once thought I would. I read an article today about a team of mathematicians solving some 120 year old math problem. Apparently it had something to do with mapping a theoretical 248 dimensional object dreamed up by Sophus Lie in the 19th century. And to get an idea how abstract this thing is the project leader claims that"To say what precisely it is is something even many mathematicians can't understand." Yet despite this (and the lack of any utility for the solution) the team spent 4 years figuring it out and creating a solution that played as an MP3 would run for 45 days straight. Anybody else out there want to call bullshit on them? I mean is there even any way that you can look at the written solution to this problem? Ah well, it just makes me that much more confident that I should be able to get funding for research that can actually be understood and presented in a few written pages.