Pre-Capped Edges
My seat is warm. My newly revived, re-batteried laptop radiated into it like a huddled puppy. Visualizations are falling and firing all over the front of my monitor, over there on the desk.
My exam is almost over. Almost. I need to shore up some simulations of DNA getting stretched, and rescale some graphs, and describe everything in a few thousand words… but the bulk of everything has happened already. I don’t miss the three weeks of 11 hour days.
It is nice in lab at night though. We work in a large basement. A very large basement. At the beginning of the year we irregularly get undergraduates wandering lost into the lab, begging for directions to the exit. During the not-seeable daylight there are gallons of physicists filtering around the corners and doorways and pipe-chases. After 8pm the numbers drop off. I can walk down the long corridor while pretending to draw in the far wall with my thoughts, without anybody interrupting the line of sight.
Late, alone in the lab I’ve been cranking out mad tunes:
Well, not Glenn Gould… but that Liszt transcription of Beethoven 6. I used to not like the 4th movement as much as the 1st and 3rd, and now its starting to become my favorite. Well, second favorite. Those first few notes still reign supreme.