It’s for the Observatory, obviously.
Plunger
Category: Uncategorized
Good Advice
The bullet point guidelines under the Psychiatric treatment section are some pretty good advice for life and human interaction in general.
- Quiet and supportive reassurance is always indicated. Help orient the patient.
- Maintain good eye contact, paraphrase statements. Explain everything thoroughly.
- Clearly explain all actions and procedures.
- Give honest answers balanced by judicious omissions.
- Remember that unconscious patients may comprehend sounds, including conversations.
- Avoid changing medics.
- Remove disruptive individuals from the team.
- Remove anxious individuals from stressful situations.
- Do not blame the patient for accident.
- Do not be flippant or dishonest.
- Do not tell victim how to feel.
- Do not expect too much or too little.
- Do not appear hurried.
- Do not expect praise or thanks for your actions.
- Above all, listen to the patient and care!
Always Be Prepared
Are you ready for anything? No, of course not. But we still prefer to be well-informed and thoughtful in case of emergency.
Nothing quite like a little brushing up on the potential breadth of backcountry injuries to give you the oogies! All things considered, we’d rather read up on it and never experience it than the other way around.
Big Tent
There are thunderstorms outside, but we need to do a tent check. Do we have all the pieces? Will everything fit inside as planned? If it’s necessary to set this up outdoors during an actual rainstorm, have we done our practice run?
Pick the largest and least occupied space in the building and get to work. If anyone asks, you’re doing this for science! (Technically true.)
Clock
Sometimes you find oddities whose initial and continued existence boggles the mind. This clock was gathering dust atop the bookcases in the student lounge, battery-free and long-forgotten.
Where did it come from? What life did it live before it came to Olin? Who thought enough of it to acquire, but not enough to take with them?
What should we do with it now?
Vintage Equipment
If it still works, it stays in service. There’s always a bit of “what’s this?” and “what’s it do?” and “how do I make it do what it does?” when stumbling across old equipment, but that’s what we have physicists for.
Collimation
LEDs can do some excellent things, primarily generating a lot of photons for very little power input, with the opportunity to have a fine degree of control over the details. Optically, though, they need a little help.
Fortunately, for our undergraduate labs in need of an adjustable light source, a spherical glass lens and an adjustable housing collimate them well enough. Which, when you need to build a lab’s worth of these things, makes life in the basement a whole lot simpler.
Caution: Magnet
Remember those days? Floppy disks and cassette tapes and VHS and all those different storage media using magnetic materials, which could be corrupted or unwritten with inadvertent exposure to strong magnetic fields.
For fun, see how many modern applications still use a stylized version of the 3.5″ floppy as a “save” icon. (As of scribbling this, Microsoft Excel does.)
Another Big Map
Of course there’s a second enormous map, just as inexplicable. Same German cartographers, same 1990s era, same corner of the Observatory.
This one’s the Middle East, or in German, Naher Oster (Near East). We’re sure there’s an interesting story on why the nomenclature’s similar but distinct in different European languages.
We’re not sure why these were set aside here, but at least they’re neat?
Big Map
We can make guesses – both educated and wild – as to why this enormous map of North Africa was tucked away in the corner of an Observatory classroom. This all-in-German map. From the 1990s.
It’s in good shape, and kinda cool in its own way. Just borderline inexplicable.