Hey, my hit counter is going up. My posts are getting comments. I must have readers!

This morning I slept late, and then took care of assorted small chores. I spent part of the afternoon in the library, getting down the basics of flow cytometry, so that I can sound smart when I go down on Monday to learn how to analyze flow cytometry data. (The basic idea, in very crude layman's terms, is that you squirt cells in a very thin stream through a beam of laser light. If you've treated the cells with an appropriate fluorescent dye, you can do interesting things like sort out cells by DNA content or cell type or various other things.)

Turns out that the light source used in many flow cytometers is a 488 nm argon laser. I used a 488 nm argon laser in one of my advanced undergraduate labs, to do Raman spectroscopy on beta-carotene. (Raman spectroscopy, in crude layman's terms. Um. Well, imagine that a molecule is a collection of balls (atoms) connected by springs (bonds). The balls have different weights, and the springs have different stiffnesses, and if you took your molecule and whacked it with a stick, the balls and springs would all vibrate at different frequencies. And if you were really clever, you could figure out from these frequencies how stiff the springs were, and how heavy the balls were, and how they were connected together. Only a molecule is very small, so instead of hitting it with a stick you hit it with a 488 nm argon laser.)

Gee, maybe I need to start putting headers on my entries: Warning: Contains Science.

Anyway, the 488 nm argon laser is a very pretty shade of blue-green. The one I worked with was powerful enough to blind you if you were foolhardy enough to put your eye in the path of the direct beam. There was a whole little safety ritual of donning goggles and checking beam stops that you did before powering it up.

It says something for Yale's trust in its Chemistry majors that I was allowed to spend hours playing around with this thing with absolutely no supervision whatsoever. (This was part of a lab course taken by advanced undergraduates and first year graduate students, designed to prepare students for graduate work. It was actually designed so that the professor was never around when you were doing the experiments. Heh.)

Anyway, after the library, I went to the Free Speech Movement Cafe on campus. They have a nice outdoor terrace, which is a very pleasant place to sit and write. And they usually have decent coffee, but this time they served me a really lousy latte. Only it was a stealth lousy latte -- it tasted okay at first, and got progressively more burned and nasty-tasting the more I drank. Yuk. I wrote for a while, until it got too cold to sit outside and I went home.

There are days when I really miss Seattle's Caffe Vita. Though they did once serve Ysa a highly dubious iced coffee, they never did me wrong with a latte.

Had dinner. Then did some more writing. Then I read a little of Graham Joyce's Indigo. So far, I don't like it as much as I liked The Tooth Fairy. The characters aren't as engaging, I suppose, and it doesn't quite hit the note of serious creepiness that The Tooth Fairy does. But maybe it'll pick up a bit later.

So, that was my day. It was pretty good, as days go. Hope yours was, too.