Month: April 2018

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The Lemon Battery

Most of us have gone through this stage in our lives when we built a lemon battery for some high school experiment. After that, you think (or may be it was just me who developed this mentality) that a lemon is some kind of a power fruit with all this electric potential.

But then, of course, those who have not built a lemon battery, might have built a potato battery. So which one is more magical as a fruit (or a vegetable)? Which side would you be on, team lemon or team potato?

Strangely, with these experiments, they wanted to introduce us to the world of batteries, but I think I never really knew how a lemon battery worked until just yesterday, around 18 years later (or my ignorance might just point towards the fact how I was probably never listening in those classes). 

It’s interesting how it’s a “lemon” battery but the lemon (or the potato) itself is of no value to the experiment. It just provides you with an electrolyte, a medium through which the charges can move, which results in the completion of a circuit. You could as well dunk zinc and copper in a salt solution, or perhaps an acidic solution, and you’ll still make a battery (may be even a better one).

Now, I am supposed to be making a presentation on batteries for a course I am taking, and I am suddenly obsessed with lemon batteries (and have been so for the past couple of days).

I figured it would give me a good start for the presentation, starting off with some thing that might not be so knowledgeable, but that would definitely be more relatable for everyone (plus I have quite a smart partner, and I am pretty confident he will pull off the technical stuff superbly).

I want to start off with a lemon battery because they are so bad, that everything is going to look state-of-the-art in comparison. But then, I stop and remind myself that I am a PhD student, and not a sales person for some battery technology. May be I should be talking about more high-level stuff than a high-school-level concept, something more suitable to the stature of a PhD.

Ahh, the pressures that come with doing a PhD degree.

You have to look smart, act smart. Talk smart. You have to show yourself as an understander-of-all-things-tough-and-technical.

A lemon battery? Pffbt. You can do better than this!

But I am currently so hooked on lemon batteries that I am going to proceed with the idea anyway (even now when I have become more aware of how it might not be the best idea – plus I would be talking about lemon batteries for the first minute and 40 seconds according to the script I am developing, and I don’t have that kind of time).

I am going to go with lemon batteries because: 1) as I said, I am hooked on them; 2) that is how I have been developing the story for the past week and a half, and starting over might not be the best case scenario; 3) I think I can still handle the concept of a lemon battery as a bad battery, and make that as a basis for jumping onto the concept of a “perfect” battery; 4) I am so hooked on lemon batteries, I couldn’t possibly now shift to the lithium ion technology, which would, of course, otherwise make more sense to start off with (I can give it 10 to 20 seconds, though); and 5) surprise, surprise, who is going to be expecting a lemon battery to pop up in a presentation being given by a PhD student? Presentations can sometimes use a little theatrics, some element of surprise, and it is not always a bad thing (it’s not like I am going to talk about lemon batteries in my PhD defense).

So lemon batteries over lithium-ion this time.

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Culture Shock

So, I am back from my weekend and my latest episode of culture shock.

When I was coming to Finland, I hadn’t taken the culture shock phenomenon very seriously (unfortunately, it wasn’t so the other way around). I mean, I already was aware that there’d be cultural differences, and that (duh) I’d had to adapt. Nobody said it is going to be easy but how hard can it get, still? I had been reading up on life in Finland, so I was mentally prepared and pretty excited to move here and experience it.

And that, dear reader, is what you call the gap between theory and practice.

I vividly remember when I first discovered I was in a state of culture shock: It was a moment of disbelief and enlightenment (if you can call it that). In fact, for this first time, I covered the distance between being-miserable to being-awestruck within 5 minutes (once I realized I was actually going through culture shock – I’d never really thought it was real).

I have found that with things like culture shock, it is very important to know what you are going through. This fact arms you with a very useful piece of information, and if you’d like to think of yourself as an experimental subject – a guinea pig in a lab, a hamster in a cage – it can turn your experience extremely entertaining (in retrospect, of course. It is quite stupid how the smallest of things can sometimes send you off into one).

They say there are four stages of culture shock:

The first one is your very excited, super-smooth, what-culture-shock-excuse-me stage. Everything is so… normal. After all, we are all people, and people, more or less, work the same way, right? You have unlocked the secret of adapting anywhere, this is just so simple.

The next one is the actual culture shock, I-don’t-know-what-I-was-thinking-(with-an-exclamation-mark) phase. This is when you suddenly realize that the place and the culture you live in now has a new normal, which is not at all what you have been thinking of “normal” all your life. Which makes you revisit all the other definitions that you had so far assumed about life. Which makes you realize that you weren’t on the same page when they said culture differences on the internet. Which is now the beginning of your culture shock, congratulations for making it this far.

After this, there should be two more stages to go, but I wouldn’t know about those – haven’t reached there yet. They should come when after repeated iterations, you have successfully reset your data to accommodate all alternative protocols that you will now need to survive in this new culture.

If you ever come across this state of mind, and are able to see it for what it truly is, your first instinct might be to close up and draw back. That is the easiest and the instinctive thing to do about it: to let it blow over.

Only, it won’t – this is a recipe for more-culture-shock. Because eventually, you will need to make contact, whether in two months or two years. So you have two options: close up or get it over with. Though this can become a problem when you don’t know how to make contact (culture shock might take away some of your social abilities and/or creative powers to deal with culture shock).

The situation will likely yo-yo for some time. So when you are in the shock phase, it helps to take into account why you had overestimated your cultural understanding and overall sensitivity to your new environment: in simple words, you had probably been expecting something that didn’t turn out quite the way you thought it would.

But then, one day, you’ll wake up and find out, heyy! no culture shock anymore! Beware, this is a lie. Never assume it is over, the sneaky little thing is probably just hiding behind your curtain. But this peek-a-boo phase is perfect for pushing yourself a little more into the culture, forming a support network, and finding out activities that you can do around.

And then there are a lot of other tiny things that can help, like blogging about it, talking to a trusted friend, taking up sports or hobbies.

They say there’s this thing then called reverse culture shock. I thought it was a figment of someone’s imagination but now I think I am changing my mind about it.

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Codes For Your Samples

If you’ll come to my lab, you’d see strangely labelled glass vials of different shapes and sizes, with all kinds of materials in them.

That is also probably one reason why I couldn’t initially find my way in the lab. Someone might tell me to use a particular solution and there I would be, lost in the freezer, trying to tell one solution apart from another by its color and consistency, or by the fact that there was p10 written on top of it (which I was later told was actually “old” – I’d just been reading it upside down).

The codes, of course, only serve their masters. All I can tell by those are that this is definitely something not I labelled.

Now, may be I find it strange and may be you wouldn’t, because perhaps you yourself have used similar systems, and lived in the same habitats, as my current lab.

I haven’t ever been a part of this kind of system. I have never had so many samples to deal with in my previous research experiences that I’d need to evolve complicated naming systems and rituals for my samples. So in the past, I had been naming my samples with their original name, and putting an underscore/hyphen/period/slash for labeling them specifically for whatever needed specification. The names can get a little long, but it had been working for me just fine.

But now, that I’m going to have lots of samples and solutions to keep track of, and following lab culture, I needed to come up with my own system of naming. And, hey! that system had to be good enough for at least four years for me: What if I stopped liking it halfway past my second year? I’d be stuck and miserable for the rest of my time here! (If not for my whole future career that hopefully lay before me). So I had to be very, very careful.

So how should I carry out the naming of my samples? The alphabets and numbers may make sense to a lot of people, but I am pretty sure that after two weeks of sample initiation, I’d most probably forget what it was and why I had a particular number assigned to it (and what good would be those alphabets and numbers to me then, if I cannot tell what they mean?).

To be able to tell which sample is which, you need to develop an emotional connection with your solutions and samples. So perhaps, you can name them like that as well, like you would name pets, or people.

So, my first sample in the series I did today could be Linda (and Linda, I’m afraid, is not doing too well in the lab). And Scruffy died a couple weeks ago, when I put a colder glass slide on a hot surface and cracked it all the way through (I still have his remains in my drawer). But Sunshine, Sunshine is looking good so far, I hope I can show her to my supervisor sometime in the near future and then take her down to the Physics department. If only Joe, Cookie, and Cheeseburger, will learn something from Sunshine, and keep to their good behavior for just a couple more experiments, It’d be great to take them down, too.

This can be pretty practical but what I particularly love about this system is it’s versatility. So many options and I doubt that I’d ever forget my best sample, Mikasa, from the Tape Effect series.

I guess I should wind up this post now… I have to go put Linda, Joe, Tin Tin, Sunshine, Cookie, Moon Crater, Bloo, and Cheeseburger in the oven.

P. S. I, obviously, also have a more professional, alphanumeric system in place to show the world.

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Of Experiments That Go Wrong

Work in the lab is a slow, agonizing grind (looking forward to that in the four years of my PhD). It’s not like everything works perfectly (except may be on some lucky days).

In fact, behind each successful attempt, there may have been tens or hundreds of experiments gone wrong, done by God-knows-how-many people.

I think I don’t mind my experiments going wrong so much if they can still tell me something I can work on (and they are telling me something new everyday). But I have been so far doing this for only three months in the recent past so sure I don’t mind my experiments going wrong (yet, but ask me in a couple months and I am sure I’ll give you a different answer then).

So I have been trying to get some thick metal oxide coatings (thick, so to speak, but they will still be thinner than half a millimeter by a factor of 1000). For the past three tries, I have ended up destroying the coatings completely.

This time around, I decided to try everything I could think of, so that may be one out of my eight samples might make it to the finish line (I have three back up glass slides just in case things start going south for all eight of them). And one of the coatings, which already appears to have gone every which way, left this sparkly substance on all my gloves.

And a strange happening as this, in a lab, gets all these questions popping in your head: Was that really fine glitter? Did it just happen or did I make it? Did I just discover a method to make, I don’t know, plenty of glitter? Do I now want to drop out of my PhD and open a glitter factory? (after obviously I have done some tests and made the process sustainable).

But it’s a real comfort to me, that I might have possibilities of alternate career paths in the world of glitter-making if my PhD doesn’t go as planned, thank you very much thick-metal-oxide-coatings. However, I need to remember that all that glitters is not gold, and a little, one-time glitter in the lab most certainly doesn’t mean I will also get it once I actually start to aim for it (in fact, more reason for the process to completely stop working).

But back to the topic of experiments that go wrong, sometimes those are the ones that really tell you what’s happening. If everything was going all right, all the time, well then, there wouldn’t be any reason to dig deeper, no need to understand the process behind it. So it’s kind of important to fail in science and learn something from it every time.

But when a series of failures, going on for months, makes you finally realize that what you have been trying may not have been even possible from the beginning, that can be quite frustrating (happens in science all the time and doesn’t feel good to be the one that’s happening to).

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The Internal Dialogue of a Chronic Procrastinator

Today was supposed to be a big day, a day when I would finally finish that review article I had started 3 weeks ago (or was it 4 weeks ago?).

But all morning, I have been displaying classic symptoms of a person who wants to avoid work at all costs.

So to the article… where did I put it? Drat, I even had it lying right in front of me, a constant reminder of my procrastination. Clearly, I hadn’t lost it, despite my messy desk. My messy desk! May be I should just use 5 minutes of my best hour of the morning to straighten my desk out.

All papers sorted out, 55 minutes remaining of my best hour. Still plenty of time to get to that paper, see? Okay, but why in the world is that sticky note lying around? How long has it been, 3 weeks? Or has it been 4? Strangely, it has been fine for all that time, but now I’m 98% sure if I don’t throw it out immediately, this apparently-innocent-piece-of-paper would cause something catastrophic to happen; it is that important that I get up, walk to that dustbin, and throw it in the garbage.

Ah, I definitely had some experiments lined up for today. Are my glass slides fine, that I washed so carefully yesterday and put them safely away in my drawer? They should be, right? May be I should just go and check on them, the lab is, after all, just two doors away.

No, no. Today we were supposed to read in the morning, remember? No going anywhere. Even if something has happened to your glass slides, there’s nothing you can do about it now that you also cannot do 90 minutes later (Okay, it’s 90 minutes now? I certainly have higher expectations from myself).

But it’s like I have this itch in my hand, don’t you see? May be if I were to hold a forcep, or a petri dish in my hand, it’d just go away…

45 minutes to kill now before I can finally declare myself unfit for reading and use the excuse of too-less-time-remaining-for-the-rest-of-my-day-tasks.

But as time ticks by, and you haven’t yet gotten into the frenzy of your experimental procedures, and neither are you letting yourself get up from your seat for a said amount of time, and you have straightened out your desk, then what else do you have left to do… But to read?

And so I took out that hour for long-awaited, piling-up-to-dangerous-levels-now reading. Still didn’t finish that article, but I didn’t really expect myself to finish that today, did I?

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Theory and Practice

I look down at my lab journal. It’s been a long, but a good enough day. Got all those glass slides washed and rinsed thoroughly for the experiment I’m planning to start tomorrow. Basically 2 hours of manual labor (there were a lot of slides to wash), but needs to be done, right? So let’s give ourselves a gold star for that (because there’s no telling which way the actual experiment will go as yet, but from my recent failed attempts, doesn’t look like I’ll be getting any kind of star for that work).

So, it’s a little late, but I definitely feel energetic enough. Great! How about finishing that review that you had started?

Yeah, okay, I could do that. In fact, I have been trying to squeeze in a little bit of reading for the past 3-4 weeks, which is just as important as manual labor in science (in fact, more important, as all that “manual labor” is, after all, designed around the literature in your field).

I mean, how hard can it really be, to just take out an hour – an hour – everyday to read up on questions that have been popping in your head for some time now? You still need to develop, like, tons of understanding of your research area – it won’t come to you in your dreams, you know.

Yes, yes, I get it. Just let me get done with this blog post.

I mean, I have been running up and down all day.  One moment, you are just supposed to follow protocol, do things like second nature, that you don’t need to think twice about. Next moment, you should slow down and sit down (reading time!) – and take deep breaths (not in the lab, mind you, too much fumes). Pick up the paper that you left off five weeks ago (you know where you left it off, right?) And then focus… F-O-C-U-S… Focus! But sometimes, no matter if you repeat the mantra in your head in all caps or in italics, you just cannot get in the Zone.

In science, you are supposed to juggle these two very different mindsets on a routine. Now you are in the lab, now you are not. Now you are in the lab again. I think when you do it better, when this shifting between these two “personas” becomes more and more seamless, you become better at your thing (after all, theory and practice are supposed to complement each other).

After brute-forcing myself to read for the past few weeks (it’s been 4 weeks and no reading done), I’m not-so-quickly finding out that I need to get to this problem more smartly. Like may be try reading in the morning instead of at the end of the day, when I mostly just end up finding a new way of telling myself to focus, without actually focusing.

Having figured out the theory, let’s see how this comes out in practice.

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The Finnish Winters

This seems to be the primary ice breaker in Finland: “So, how are you enjoying the Finnish winters?” (It’s even phrased almost the same way). Or may be that was just because I arrived here smack dab in the middle of winters.

Sometimes I laugh it off. Sometimes I just do a general commentary on that day’s weather. And sometimes, I admit to hating it. 

Where I come from, it’s 48-degree-Celsius-in-peak-time-of-summer hot. And snow, that’s fairy dust for us. People revere snow. Of course, we do have snow in some parts of the country, and all trips to these “exotic” regions are planned according to when there’s snow in the forecast or the news.

Apart from these once-in-a-while excursions, we are not adapted to winters that are as frigidly cold as the Finnish ones, or as dark.

Here, there’s more snow in a month than the total I had seen in my life before coming here, so of course after a while, I started suffering from this condition called too-much-snow. But then the days got longer and we moved from snow to slush, and it was all going very well. In fact, it was happening just like I expected it to – except that it snowed in again after some days, and again after some more days, and again.

So may be it was my pride that got hurt (because it didn’t go just as I expected), or my elbow when I slipped on a bad piece of ice, but I cannot say I will have fond memories of my first Finnish winter (which, people tell me was colder in this part of the country than it usually is). May be next year, when I’m more adapted to the cold, and have probably gotten myself into trying something winter-specific.

It’s all good for some time, but man! where is that spring season one of my colleagues promised me was just around the corner?

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The Finnish Doctorate

In the 3 months that I have been involved in a PhD at Åbo Akademi University, I have come to the conclusion that just the act of pursuing a PhD in Finland warrants keeping a blog about it.

Because Finland is right on the opposite end of the spectrum of all cultures I have experienced so far. This inevitably also shows up in how one organization, or one group, does research. I find it quite interesting how these “cultural” differences can dictate how you approach a scientific problem, and how you interact with the system and people around you.

This can make for topics interesting enough to make it worth it to drop the research process once in a while to document the experiences.

But then again, the PhD process itself can be full of ups and downs, and well, blogging is the obvious way to go about it for me.

So here’s to doctoring through a Finnish PhD, and writing about it.