So my church doesn't have a Good Friday service. That's not uncommon these days. But it still disturbs me. One could argue that Easter is the most important period of the year for Christians. If Jesus hadn't come and died on the cross, we would all be lost for eternity. It's only because of what happened, that we remember at Easter, that we can have any hope at all of salvation.
I also know that it's worse in the US; there, Good Friday isn't even a holiday. When I was living there I took the day off, to remember and that, but everyone thought I was weird.
Yet there was an interesting thing that happened yesterday. In the weekly email newsletter from the MacDiarmid Institute, of which I am a member, the director wrote:
"The Easter and Anzac long weekends are upon us and I hope that you are able to take some time away from your work to be with family and friends. I am not sure what to say about the overlap of these two remembrance events (it is the first time I can remember them coinciding), except to say that it is a chance to reflect on the history and meaning that lies behind them."
I don't know the director's personal background. But it was encouraging to see him calling Easter a time of remembrance with 'history and meaning'.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Melbourne, Melbourne, Chicago
Once again I must apologise for not updating this anywhere nearly as frequently as I have in the past. I guess things have just been muddling along, and although I've been travelling it's been to the same places. I haven't written about it because I don't want to bore you... so some feedback on this issue would be more than welcome! Do you want to hear about my latest trip, even if it's "I went to Melbourne and did some experiments"? And how much detail do you want?
In anticipation of an affirmative answer to the first question, I had a trip to Melbourne at the end of February, doing some work with a group from Auckland University. It was their first time, and it didn't go smoothly - for the first day, at least. Anyway we managed to modify the experiment, so instead of having a reaction going on the beam line and us watching things change in real time, we (well, they) were busy making samples in the lab, drying them, grinding them into fine powder, packing into tiny glass capillary tubes, and measuring them that way. It was very intensive and at the end of it I was glad we only had 3 days!
Today I am in Melbourne again, for a proposal advisory commmittee meeting. The committee meets 3 times a year, to discuss beam line development and review the proposals that have come in. So it was fly in this morning, stay overnight, and fly out tomorrow morning. It was theoretically possible to fly out today, but that would mean leaving home at 4:30 am and not getting home until midnight, so I would have ended up taking tomorrow off anyway.
Then next week I am off to Chicago for some experiments looking at the size distribution of nanoparticles and their aggregates in sunscreen formulations. We have been trying to secure beam time for this experiment for about a year, so it's great to finally have some success. The work is completely unrelated to any of the projects I am meant to be working on, but fortunately the Royal Society has a fund that you can apply for, for travel funding to support new research linkages, particularly between NZ, Australia, the US and a few other countries. Since the work involves myself, a girl in Sydney, Mike in the US and a facility in the US, it seemed an ideal application. And of course, the public interest factor of nano-zinc oxide in sunscreen helps too. When someone high up in the MacDiarmid Institute heard about it, they offered to cover the rest of the costs (because of the good PR that would generate). So that's all go...
...and finally, the week after Easter I've been invited to speak at a conference in Rotorua. I'm not sure when I will find time to prepare my talk! although it's not so bad, because I will be reusing several slides from the talk I gave at the conference in Korea last year.
In anticipation of an affirmative answer to the first question, I had a trip to Melbourne at the end of February, doing some work with a group from Auckland University. It was their first time, and it didn't go smoothly - for the first day, at least. Anyway we managed to modify the experiment, so instead of having a reaction going on the beam line and us watching things change in real time, we (well, they) were busy making samples in the lab, drying them, grinding them into fine powder, packing into tiny glass capillary tubes, and measuring them that way. It was very intensive and at the end of it I was glad we only had 3 days!
Today I am in Melbourne again, for a proposal advisory commmittee meeting. The committee meets 3 times a year, to discuss beam line development and review the proposals that have come in. So it was fly in this morning, stay overnight, and fly out tomorrow morning. It was theoretically possible to fly out today, but that would mean leaving home at 4:30 am and not getting home until midnight, so I would have ended up taking tomorrow off anyway.
Then next week I am off to Chicago for some experiments looking at the size distribution of nanoparticles and their aggregates in sunscreen formulations. We have been trying to secure beam time for this experiment for about a year, so it's great to finally have some success. The work is completely unrelated to any of the projects I am meant to be working on, but fortunately the Royal Society has a fund that you can apply for, for travel funding to support new research linkages, particularly between NZ, Australia, the US and a few other countries. Since the work involves myself, a girl in Sydney, Mike in the US and a facility in the US, it seemed an ideal application. And of course, the public interest factor of nano-zinc oxide in sunscreen helps too. When someone high up in the MacDiarmid Institute heard about it, they offered to cover the rest of the costs (because of the good PR that would generate). So that's all go...
...and finally, the week after Easter I've been invited to speak at a conference in Rotorua. I'm not sure when I will find time to prepare my talk! although it's not so bad, because I will be reusing several slides from the talk I gave at the conference in Korea last year.
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