Skip Navigation

Science Memes @mander.xyz

fossilesque @mander.xyz

2mo ago

where the magic happens owo

49 comments

I fix software on these things! No one ever quite gets what I do for work, it's nice to run across in the wild.
I feel seen lol
- What do they do?
  
  Top left is a thermal cycler. Basically it heats and cools samples at a given rate. This is primarily used for generic PCR, and certain enzymatic reactions. Top right is the fancier version of this, it is for qPCR, so it can do the heating and cooling and has a laser/detector for the dye or probe that reacts to generating more dna with each PCR cycle so you can quantify approximately how much of the target DNA you had.
  Bottom right is a luminex. This uses detection of fluorophore signals to measure multiple analyates, usually different proteins.
  Idk what bottom left is.
  
  Some kinda lab work, maybe blood chem or urinalysis. I should clarify that since I'm a software person I don't even know what they do, really, I just fix it when they stop transmitting lab test results to the database.

- beige box where the magic happens

You'll need a PhD to be allowed to push the "on" button though.
And then go back to the office to write grant applications for a month.
To buy the next beige box.

This used to be IT in the early 2000s

Beige as far as the eye could see (in a data centre)
- Yeah, I came here to air my hypothesis that lab hardware trends lag behind consumer computers by about 25-30 years.
  
  Are you saying there used to be woodgrain lab hardware?
  
  So it's almost time for teal, orange et other fun colors, mixed with translucent plastic lab équipement?
- Nowadays it's a lot more of dark mode, which is a shame (especially since our software still doesn't have it)
- I'm waiting for it come back in to style. I've pitched getting beige racks with this on the side https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_(design)
  
  woah dude, that's far out
- Honestly, I think it was so ugly it was beautiful.
  
  There is also this particular tone of light brownish green which is on so many industrial tools like drill presses, table top saws and so on. I kinda dig it
- Were we still using 3.5” floppies in the early 2000s?
  
  Oh yes, I was using a 3.5" floppy disk drive with a USB connector in 2007 to kick off imaging on desktop machines as no one could get the ghost boot server working.

But do you have magic box where the beige happens?
- That's at home Depot.

*very expensive beige box
- Gun! Where we shoot the people who break the beige box where the magic happens.

Which beige box will turn me into a femboy?
- This one
  
  Leave the bottle...

Most of ours used to be white!

We had a bright orange magic box that was connected to a beige windows 95 box that you were never allowed to turn off because nobody knew if it would survive a reboot and there was no software for the orange box for a more modern setup. Almost felt an like arcane ritual, typing in the command lines to get it to work.
- No power outages?
  
  Probably plugged into some sort of UPS or the building has backup power.
- Could honestly try a virtual machine or an emulator at that point. Would be worth a shot.
  
  My workplace was still using DOS machines (386s) in 2015 to format letters. It couldn't be emulated as the critical component was an ISA card
  One of the pieces of work I worked on was diverting the data stream aimed at that letter system and translating it to go via our more modern correspondence system

Available in the Thermo Fisher catalog for $39,900,800.00 each.

Johnny Ives would have gotten rid of all those nasty bevels.

Science was cooler when you had to use a screwdriver.
(This ad paid for by Demon Core Ltc.)

49 comments