Week 2: Strictly Confidential Number 32

Again, here's the robot gif of the week...

Oreo surgery

If we have any hope of bringing micro-robots into medicine, they've really just got to be able to do surgery. And to do surgery you need knives. So here's a good question: can robots be trusted with knives. Well just take a gander a few inches upwards.

But seriously, robots (as of now) do exactly what you tell them to do. So if we have a robot with a knife, or as is more likely for nano-robotics, an army of tiny robotic knives, it will do exactly what we want. We can trust these robots only as much as the humans controlling them. There ain't no terminator coming any time soon.

But onto business.

Turns out that magnet project was kind of confidential. Whoops. Hush hush.

Also there really is nothing to see or hear this week. It was kind of a lazy week. Just finished up the orders for the table (which was still redesigned multiple times over the course of the week) and almost slept through the lab safety training class.

Seriously, I was stuffed in a classroom with 30 other sleepy students (who obviously didn't want to be there) learning about lab safety from the cheesiest freaking video (filled with low-budget acting) and a professor (who also obviously didn't want to be there).

It's funny because just a few weeks prior, I had taken an online course on laboratory waste management. The course included a slideshow with a professor's voice, which was unsurprisingly patronizing in tone. But the one aspect of the ordeal that just shot right of the screen was the way he said "waste." It was simply insipid, like Barney Rubble smoking pot. The "was" part was drawled, with the longest "a" imaginable. And the "te" part was heavily accented, like he was making machine gun noises.

And if you hadn't guessed already, the professor said the word "waste" in almost every sentence, sometimes even multiple times in each. The funny part is how I had later declared this to be the most boring course I will ever take. Haha, psyche.

Turns out, boredom truly is contagious. It just takes 2 hours steeping in the disinterest of 31 individuals to become #32.