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This one. A natural offshoot of this. Science types love to talk and write about science, even if they can’t do it well, or even if there is no audience present.

Hello, is anyone out there?

Handy Lab Skills 1

Lockpicking. An attractive pastime for the curious puzzle lovers.

It all started with the MIT Guide to Lockpicking naturally, which had been floating around various BBSes in the late 80s/early 90s. That went down quickly through a 2400bps modem, though it had choked on the graphics files, and young innocent me was left figuring out what the text had been trying to describe. It made sense eventually, although understanding came slow, given the lack of in-house machining tools. Experiments with paperclips led to mixed results and much frustration, but the learning experience was valuable nonetheless. The biggest break came when I got access to a grinding tool (heh, heh).

So why’s it a handy lab skill? For one, most locks in lab settings aren’t meant to seriously secure valuable stuff; rather, it’s to stop people from messing up your filing system. Or to stop people from casually borrowing (and not returning) the sole surviving copy of a manual for some obsolete piece of lab gear. Or, simply to stop people from doing something stupid. Whatever the case, locks used for the above are usually cheaply mass-manufactured imprecise little devices that would yield to the simplest of improvised lockpicks.

A paperclip, straightened out, end squashed with a pair of pliers and hand-filed for the pick;a thin strip of aluminium, folded over and then bent for a torque wrench. Both are quite soft and deformable, but if you’re using that much force, you’re doing it wrong anyway (or the lock’s just horribly rusty, but that almost never happens in a climate-controlled lab environment).

These two simple things have:

• gotten past a laser keylock
• opened a filing cabinet of equipment manuals
• enabled a long-forgotten closet to be accessed
• extracted 5.25″ floppy disks from their locked plastic case
• rescued imprisoned donuts

And for all except the donuts, the key was last in the possession of the student who graduated a decade ago. A successful dissertation defence really makes you eager to leave.

A more robust version of the above can be crafted in less than an hour, given some scraps of spring steel and a grinder. Although you don’t get that many bragging rights, of course.

Hello, world

Yep. I talk science. It’s pretty much a requirement for the job. Talking science to scientists is the easy part. It’s making it understandable to your funding agency, venture capitalists and taxpayers that’s hard. Still, it’s gotta be done, in one form or other. So why not here?