Today I went to the lab in the morning for about an hour and did some secretarial work cleaning up my lab notebook and washing dishes, etc. Then, at about 11 I thought I’d check up on the Argentina vs. Germany game. To my surprise it was already over, and the Argentineans had LOST! :O They got completely creamed 4-0. It was terrible. Next, it was off to lunch (beans and rice… yum yum) where I watched a little bit of the Spain vs. Paraguay game. Great game, but I don’t think that the Spaniards were playing up to their full potential. The Paraguay players weren’t doing wonderfully, but their “clump” defense strategy worked well on the Spaniards usual passing scheme. I think that the pressure was starting to get to the Spaniards; each player thought that if they didn’t make the goal, no one else would. Consequently each player hung onto the ball for a little bit longer than they should have, and that gave the Paraguay players an opportunity to steal the ball. After lunch, I decided that I had too much work to do to be able to watch the rest of the game. So I unfortunately didn’t see the amazing goal, but I heard all about it from Univision.com where I reloaded the page every other minute to see how the game was going.
The brine shrimp had hatched when I got back from lunch so I started the long process of setting up the new experiments. These are just control experiments to test the solution that I am putting the plants in (to make sure that that isn’t what is killing them). Then I’m also doing a positive control test. Basically, I have to verify in every experiment that I don’t have super-shrimp on my hands. This is done by finding a chemical that will kill 50% of the shrimp slowly, as a toxic plant would. I am using K2Cr2O7 aka potassium dichromate an extremely poisonous chemical (muahahaha). Anyway I have to set up control-control experiments to test what the highest % of alcohol that the shrimp can live in is and what concentration of K2Cr2O7 I’ll need. So that took basically all afternoon.
Then at about 4:30 I got ready to go to a 4th/3rd of July party with all of the researchers. It was nice, but a tad awkward. C’est la vie.
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