Monday, 7 July 2008

Monday 7th July

Today marks the beginning of my eldest son Matthew's work experience week with me. We've already done a job this morning that I thought would last all day. It's great having a personal assistant right next to you as opposed to secretarial offices and technical workshops that help a lot but aren't immediately sitting next to you! So we've done some analysis on our first year students' performance, mainly looking for correlations between performance at University and A-level grades. In previous years, the correlation has been extremely weak but this year it is a bit stronger.

Tomorrow, we 're going to start filming an experiment called "Tim's Monolayer Eating Experiment" which will be useful for our website and for talks on LB Technology. I'll not spoil the surprise about exactly what it is since I can post on this blog when it's finished. Let me just tell you that you won't be particularly enthralled unless you are fascinated by mono-molecular thin films like me! That does rule out a lot of the population!!!!

Well, the only other thing to add this lunchtime is some mention of yesterday's amazing Wimbledon tennis final. My Spanish friends will be mentally exhausted today! Viva Nadal! Viva Espana!!! It was totally incredible - probably the best final ever. It's been a great summer so far for Spain and the Olympics haven't even started yet. So Felicidades Rafa! Tienes el campeon del mundo!
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4 comments:

Ben Robinson said...

A monolayer eating experiment sounds much more interesting than our current project of threatening an LB trough with increasingly large hammers until it decides to behave itself, and remember that it has two independent barriers, again. I look forward to the video.

7 July 2008 at 05:01
TIM RICHARDSON said...

Hi Ben - it's an experiment that I've been doing for years to demonstrate the existence of the monolayer (even in cases when it is invisible to the eye)and also the sensitivity of the trough feedback mechanism. It should be on the blog by the end of the week hopefully and maybe youtube.....
hope it's all going well for you in Bangor. Any news re fellowships?

7 July 2008 at 05:14
Ben Robinson said...

Heard back a short time ago, but unfortunately I didn't get it. What we hadn't realised, and in hindsight what wasn’t made clear at all, was that the fellowships were open across all academic disciplines; apparently there were in excess of 500 applicants for 50 fellowships. Geoff knows the outcome but I’ve not really made it public yet (until now!) we did a post-mortem on the application and both agreed there was nothing we would have changed. I’ve got quite a few ideas for interesting projects at the moment though, so I’m not going to let the rejection get me down, just write more fellowship applications at the next opportunity, which is towards the end of the summer. In the meantime I’ll continue to struggle to keep up with the next crazy scheme to come down from the boss. In fact thinking about it, your description of your personal assistant sounds suspiciously like the role of certain post-docs I could name…

7 July 2008 at 05:58
Sue Meal said...

Ahhhh, es meu amic Rafa Nadal. As you probably know he's a fellow Mallorquín.
I was even given his flight ticket by accident once, and he got mine. Luckily I caught up with him so he could eventually go on to the Canadian Open rather than going to see my friends in Chicago! And luckily Federer didn't get to play against me in the final, he wouldn't have had a chance!

24 July 2008 at 13:18

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