Crazy, wasteful packaging

I bought a box of 100 new test tubes from our departmental stores yesterday. They came in a cardboard box which, when opened, revealed layers of test tubes separated by cardboard partitions. Nothing new there. Except that each layer of tubes was held in place in a vacuum-moulded plastic tray. What a waste of plastic - a little bit of tissue paper would have been quite adequate.



Well done Fischer Scientific!

In fairness, I must admit that they are quite good test tubes.

Windows Vista - LiveKernelReports

My housemate has temporarily installed Windows Vista on a virtual machine in order to see what it's like. On the whole, it's just like XP except things have been moved around a bit and given a glossy make-over with extra frills and animations.

Personally, I think GUI's are for wimps and I ran a command prompt and started nosing around the file system. The directory tree has been tidied up a lot, with only 4 at root level. The Windows directory is as voluminous as ever and several directories contained files with what appear to me to be new file name extensions.

The one really intriguing thing, though, was the directory "C:\Windows\LiveKernelReports". On trying to open this,

C:\Windows> cd LiveKernelReports
Access is denied.
C:\Windows>

Eh? I looked at the security properties under WinExplorer and found I had all the necessary permissions. Double clicking from with Explorer gave me 2 alerts, but clicking [continue] on both allowed me into the folder. It was empty. Having done this, the cmd prompt allowed me into the directory.

Why all this fuss? I really hate being told that this or that directory contains files that are important to my computer and that I really musn't fiddle. Hey - it's my (or in this case my housemate's lab's) computer!

Update - it's been a few days ...

A very exciting thing has happened - I've had my mobile 'phone upgraded to the sleek, modern, stylish and ultra-'hip' Motorola PEBL. This means that I'm now able to take pictures of reasonable quality, transfer them to my computer by USB and upload them to my blog.

Just to prove the point, here's a picture of my Osmunda regalis that is doing extremely well in the garden in Botley.

Considering that I had given it up for dead after it withered last summer, I was delighted to see it producing fronds of 18-24" this year!




Here's a close-up of a diamorphic frond with the sporangia. I think these ferns are really cool. They are quite difficult to propagate because the chlorophyll-bearing spores are only viable for a short time.






I once visited an extraordinary stand of Osmunda with the BPS in the New Forest. The plants were growing in a knee-deep bog and were taller than me (I'm 6'2"!). The sporangia were ripe and we were almost choking in the dusty spores that were being released each time we jogged a plant.



My sporlings are doing pretty well from when they were potted on. I've taken the cover off the greenhouse because it was too difficult to water them. I will try and get them out of the greenhouse and onto the patio floor. Here's a picture of most of them.






Last night, whilst routing through my letter rack I found a whole pack of spores that I misplaced last year. I think that I'll be sowing them soon so that I can grow them on through the winter and put them out into the greeenhouse in the spring.

Retrosynthesis II

Yesterday evening we held our second informal retrosynthesis session in St. John's bar. It was quite good, though the molecule I chose was a little hard. It provided some good discussion with each of us coming up with different approaches, so I think it was quite a useful exercise. The sum of our deliberations was to disconnect the 8-membered ring first and then open the aminal-type centres to amines and carbonyls, envisaging reductive amination as a synthesis. I wondered whether you could disconnect them all at one and stew it up to get the cyclisations you wanted, though we seemed to agree that this might just be wishful thinking.

For the isolation, see JNP 2005 258.

Picture

I've decided there aren't enough pictures on this blog - so here's one that I recently had developed and have scanned in. It was taken in North Wales, somewhere a little SW of Snowdon. I think it's a really beautiful landscape and would work well in watercolours.

Note the Pteridium aquilinum everywhere!

Potting on

I had a great evening yesterday potting on the rest of my ferns. The species that I have are:

Asplenium adiantum-nigrum
Asplenium trichomanes subsp trichomanes (?)
Athyrium filix-femina
Cystopteris fragilis
Dryopteris affinis subsp affinis
Dryopteris affinis subsp borreri
Pellaea andromedifolia
Polypodium interjectum
Polypodium australae
Pteris cretica
Woodsia ilvensis
Woodsia obtusa

Plus a couple of randoms that are supposed to be polypodys but look like Dryopteris to me!

I reckon I've got about 180-200 plants in around 180 pots now. I have a 3-tiered metal-framed PVC-covered greenhouse which gets about 40 pots per shelf as well as a similarly constructed cold frame that is now full to bursting - I've put all the affinis affinis in there but there are also some cuttings from my parents' garden that I'm trying to propagate.

They all looked a bit bedraggled last night, but they've perked-up somewhat overnight and I think they'll be OK.

The only problem is that getting a watering can in between the shelves of the greenhouse is really difficult, so I'll have to get the pots out each time they need watering, which given the current weather is going to be often. The plan is to water them all again tonight, and then work on them in rotation - one shelf a day. I don't believe in excessive watering - it just engenders a dependence that can't be practically maintained.

Unfortunately, having started at 7.30 (after getting more pots from Homebase) I wasn't through until 9.45 and so I have to go and make jam sandwiches for today because I haven't any more cheese and didn't make it to the co-op: sometimes you have to suffer for the things you love!

Out of the living room into the greenhouse ...

I'm talking about my ferns, of course!

I got home yesterday and saw that they were beginning to get just a little scorched by the evening sun coming through the (north-facing) patio window. This, coupled with their now well-developed sizes (mostly - my polypodys aren't doing so well) made me think it was time to start hardening them off.

Today is a fairly average temperature day, though there's a cold breeze. I have a small metal-framed PVC-covered 3-tier greenhouse in my back garden. I have it against the east side of a wall, which means it's pretty sheltered and out of direct sunlight except in late mid-summer, when it gets a little in the evening. My plan is to leave it open (there's a roll-up front cover) during the day but close it at night for at least the first week (or if frost is likely - which can happen right into mid-June in Oxford).

I will need to pot most of them on soon because at the moment there are 2 or 3 plantlets per 3" pot, whereas they need to be one-per-pot really at this stage. I hope to put some photos on here soon!