Come up to the lab /And see what's on the slab...

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I'm in the lab with a bit of spare time. I need some deionized water for my experiment and the tap wasn't working; I asked somebody about it and they said the system was broken today. They've gone downstairs to get me a bucket of the stuff.

My project has picked up again with the discovery of a paper (see -here- if you're interested) which talks about using certain chemicals to suspend carbon nanotubes to make a kind of CNT ink. This may be just what I need, so I'm trying it out. The relevant chemicals are all fairly safe - in fact they're commonly found in things like artificial blood plasma and soap - so I won't be too afraid about using them in the lab. Chinese lab safety, in any case, tends to be a rather low priority. My lab is well-funded by industry, so the facility for safety is quite good. The awareness tends to be a little behind, however. Nobody wears a lab coat unless they're going into a clean room, where you need one to avoid contamination of the experiments or equipment. Nobody except me ever wears goggles. I have seen people carrying organic solvents around wearing flip-flops and shorts, and there's someone else who likes to wear high heels while tending her vacuum chamber experiments. My lab is a walk in the park compared with the rest of the university, though. Lewys' department sounds like a deathtrap, and his supervising student clearly needs supervision of his own. In one episode, unlikely to be a one-off, the student was preparing a dangerous concentrated acid solution. He was sitting down at the desk, wearing shorts and sandals and neither gloves nor goggles, peering into it closely while it fizzed and occasionally lifting it up to above eye-height while continuing to stir it.

I never thought I'd be longing for a risk assessment.

Crowd management

This week seems to be Tsinghua's Fresher's Week and yesterday they had the outdoor fresher's fair near our dorm. They had hundreds of stalls with lots of noise, in true Chinese style: shouting, recorded announcements, music and more. They seemed to be using a bus for something, too. There were red lantern-shaped balloons and brightly-coloured flags all over the place, and more cars than I've ever seen on campus before, all here to bring the students back. The student body numbers about 30000 - about the population of Winchester city. From time to time this week I've seen huge crowds of people (four abreast, snaking for about 400m) walking up or down the main thoroughfares. After lunch today I saw just such a crowd heading from the dorms southwards to the departments, except that every person was carrying their own stool. It was a little surreal. Thankfully the crowd was being made to only occupy the right-hand lane; not that lanes usually mean much to traffic here but at least I could overtake.

The crowds in the canteens have quadrupled over last week's numbers, as indicated by the number of bikes stacked around them. Speaking of bikes, I think my ability to cope with bad driving has improved over the last month. I still find it incredible that drivers and cyclists here, like people in crowds at tourist attractions, think only of themselves, at the expense of safety and often traffic flow. It does not cross the mind of the average Chinese driver to 'Give Way', and in any case if they did then someone else would shove themselves into the gap. At every junction, traffic in the right-hand lane can turn right when the lights are red, and cars usually force a path through the stream of crossing pedestrians just because they can. On large roads, cycle lanes appear to go both ways, and just because they drive on the right here doesn't mean you always pass on the left. Deciding which side to pass an oncoming bike on becomes a cross between quick pragmatism and chicken.

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Right, so it seems my lab is unable to provide me with H2O at present: I must wait until tomorrow.

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