PhD

For me the draft in the lab is the main reason

Picture from PhD-comics.

Closet

Due to the limited amount of space in my apparment combined with my talent to hoard furniture the placement of a bed posed severe problems. They were solved however by the help of a folding bed.

Found on ebay, carried to the 2nd floor by great helpers and screwed into the wall. 

Practical but not pretty. So several options were considered ranging from painting to posters and finally I decided on selfadhesive wallpaper from Knauber. The result is shown underneath.

The boxes and the carpet were bought in IKEA.

Library

This is a Bookshelf....an open bookshelf

It's placed on the Poppelsdorfer Allé and the idea is to pick a book and bring it back when you read it or put in another book instead. It's absolutely brilliant, and people use it. Sometimes people stop by in the middle of the night on the way back from a party and start reading. 

However the most impressive thing is, that it never gets vandalized. This is the first step towards a perfect society.

Castle

The last two days were spent at our G4-meeting, which is a fancy name for a meeting of four different scientific groups once a year. This year it all went down at Burg Bischofstein, a camp school near the Mosel. 

It's quite beautiful, however the shared showers and rooms with 6, 180 cm bunk beds certainly put a damper on things. We did have fun though, for example when we put a 2 m tall wooden knights statue in on of the professor's beds. ;-)

Traditions

When a baby is born friends decorate the house. I love that tradition. And happy birthday Marie. ;-)

Humour

This is Peter

He was found in the lab's dishwasher today.

We don't quite know what Peter's purpose is, but since he is a rather charming fellow we decided to name and keep him. 

(Chemist's sense of humour, you don't have to laugh)

Snob

Jobsnobs or actually....educationsnobs. The world is full of them! So is the blogosphere.
People that claim to be smarter because of their education, or simply because they have an education. Craftsmen are probably good at what they do, but you can't have an intelligent conversation with them.

However I'm willing to testify that many academics are impossible to listen too and talk with. In short: Intelligence doesn't depend on education. 

Neverthelss many seem to believe that this is the case. Denmark and other Scandinavian countries are a beautiful example of this snobbery. Every child is more or less expected to go to highschool or corresponding educational establishment, everything else is failure. Moreover university graduates will claim that they have nothing in common with people, with a lower education level.

I have many different friends, with whom I have many different things in common. But none of them are my friends because we are equally educated. Qualities such as empathy, great humour and commitment are more important to me and I've found these qualities in all types of people.

It would be nice if we could throw this idea of the supremacy of higher education overboard and just see people for who they are, instead of what they are.

Friends

In this case I'm talking about the friends in the lab, more specifically machines that make life in the lab easier.
This cute little thing, called the "Fraksammler", and collects fractions from a column.

For all non-chemists: a column is used to purify compounds after reactions and looks something like this:

The magic about this machine is that you don't have to be around your column all the time to check and switch test tubes. Basically it makes you lazier but faster. ;-)