14/12/12

Arm is slightly less sore today, well I can move it a bit now anyway, although is still not great. As long as this works though I don't mind, so fingers crossed!

Labs this morning was a bit of a matlab session, with 10 minutes of data collection in the middle to repeat some dubious looking data.. Each data set I plotted contained 2500 points and I did around 20 graphs! There were a few arguments with matlab along the way because it got a bit confused by some of our data so took some tactful point excluding to get some lines of best fit.

The plan for the rest of this project is mainly data analysis and looking at reaction kinetics and potentially a bit more data collection using a different laser just to see if that makes any difference. As interesting as some of it is, and the applications are definitely important, as a lab project it's going to get rather dull. Always a little bit soul destroying just crunching lots of data, when you know a computer could be doing all of it for you, we probably could have automated the data collection process too!

Most of our graphs are saved and we didn't get physical copies, but here's the most interesting looking one. This graph proves that taking more samples improves error margins with data. A real revelation eh?


Most of the graphs were far less exciting and were just showing an exponential decay of signal intensity...fun times!

I should probably mention valentines day...I think I have reached the point in the day where getting swept off my feet by my Prince Charming, or a knight in shining armour is looking unlikely. I quite fancy an early night but we're having some sort of compulsory film and pizza evening in the house so we can all be alone together! Can't really afford pizza, nor do I particularly want to sit and watch a horror movie but I'll try and be sociable, at least for a while.

I think newly sore arm, lack of sleep and lack of enthusiasm to do anything chemistry related (not being helped by the fact as of Thursday we're going to have lots of work to get done, in a very short time and there's no real way to start it early) is making me grumpy again!

It's times like this that being able to ride my bike or go for a drive would be rather useful but sadly neither of those are possible!

Hopefully I'll be a bit more smiley tomorrow - should have slightly more sleep under my belt and Wednesday lectures are normally good :-)