{"id":1436,"date":"2007-05-23T09:15:03","date_gmt":"2007-05-23T09:15:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2007\/05\/23\/dorky-poll-lab-relics\/"},"modified":"2007-05-23T09:15:03","modified_gmt":"2007-05-23T09:15:03","slug":"dorky-poll-lab-relics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/05\/23\/dorky-poll-lab-relics\/","title":{"rendered":"Dorky Poll: Lab Relics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome to the laboratory graveyard:<\/p>\n

\"i-a7c07c4ac1e719f2580bd2d0eef0d8fb-sm_old_equipment.jpg\"<\/p>\n

This picture shows the back room in one of the labs, and most of the gear in it is broken or useless. There’s a computer that’s so old it has a 5 1\/4″ floppy drive, the skeleton of a vacuum evaporator, a crappy student STM system, and an electrometer that’s so old it has a nicely carved wooden frame. Actually, that last one probably counts as an antique, and might be worth something on that basis. It’s certainly not being used, though.<\/p>\n

And yet, we keep this stuff around, because we can’t bear to throw it out. Which brings us to the Dorky Poll question:<\/p>\n

\n

What’s the most useless piece of apparatus floating around your work space for no good reason?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

This is a tough one. I inherited my lab space from a previous faculty member who left a lot of stuff behind when he moved back to California. The more obviously useless stuff, I got rid of, but there are a lot of relics hanging around because for some reason, I thought they might be useful for something. These are piled up on shelves and a counter top in the back corner of my lab:<\/p>\n

\"i-8e0f1414e06faba5217fd51b9cc5bd36-sm_junk_corner.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Some of that stuff is actually useful gear that’s just been stacked there while I work on other stuff, but the binders are manuals for computer software that runs on a computer we don’t have any more. I’m really not sure why I haven’t thrown those out.<\/p>\n

Probably the single most useless piece of experimental hardware in that stack is a scope camera. That is, a mount that holds a Polaroid camera in front of an analog oscilloscope, so you can take blurry pictures of experimental signals that you then paste into a lab notebook, and measure with a rule to try to determine features of your signal. This was apparently used as recently as 1999, but I recently spent $1700 to buy a digital oscilloscope with a USB port on the front, that does a much better job of transferring scope traces into a more convenient format.<\/p>\n

So, what’s the most useless thing you have lying around?<\/p>\n

(Note: This post topic was actually suggested by my parents, after hearing this NPR story about hoarding<\/a>. So, well, thanks, Mom.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Welcome to the laboratory graveyard: This picture shows the back room in one of the labs, and most of the gear in it is broken or useless. There’s a computer that’s so old it has a 5 1\/4″ floppy drive, the skeleton of a vacuum evaporator, a crappy student STM system, and an electrometer that’s… Continue reading Dorky Poll: Lab Relics<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my_lab","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1436\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}