Buying condoms on petty cash

When you are practising science on a tiny budget you sometimes have to get creative with replacement equipment. The following happened nearly a year ago, I’ve just happened to find what I wrote at the time. Taken from a chat log at the time. [dtl-afk] I’m just about to ask stores to reimburse me from …

Labels

With the news that 10,000 bags have been misplaced at airports since the start of the terror alert, you may be wishing for a simple, easy way to make sure your bags do not get lost. I suggest you label your luggage with these attractive stickers:

*BOOM* A tale of woe.

It has been said that young amateur scientists typically fall into one of four categories: those trying to make explosives, those with an interest in electronics, astronomers and those that like to take dead animals apart. I didn’t fit the classification so well, I had an active interest in all of those things. It was …

Happiness is a warm gun hot soldering iron.

Things are getting along quite well in the new lab. Large pieces of aluminium have been turned into small pieces of aluminium (and a lot of swarf), spectrometers have been upgraded and calibrated, and I’ve just finished building some constant current regulators for low currents. The current regulators don’t work how I thought they should, …