Smrt gas

Oh yeah, that's me: SMRT.

Today in the lab I was trying to turn on a Bunsen burner. I turned on the wrong side of the gas tap and vented a big old stinky stream of natural gas in the laboratory. As if that wasn't stupid enough, I wanted to know immediately if the amount of gas I'd put in the air was dangerous, so I grabbed a sparker and sparked it around me. Nothing happened. Kind of disappointed, I proceeded to correctly light the Bunsen burner, right by where I'd vented the gas, and walk away. That was stupid too.

Robots

I wish there were more robots in science. Growing up, I was inundated with tales of robots sealed in sterile rooms doing dangerous science experiments hundreds of times faster than a human could do. Multi-pipetting robot arms. Media making thingamazoos and other cool machines. But, working in science as an apprentice mad scientist, I find myself disappointed. Where are all the big shiny robots, just anthropomorphic enough to remind us of our own fragility? Where are all the fancy humming machines with levers and swirly-gigs and doo-dads, lights and pinging noises and lots and lots of brightly colored, even backlit, buttons?

Simply put, what is it about the commercial nature of science today that standardizes it so much that scientists don't get to feel as special and smrt?

More on this later...