Today I Learned:
1) A point gauge is a device for measuring steady-state water height.
2) Rheology is the study of fluid flow deformation. A rheoid is a solid material that flows by shear forces at least a thousand times faster than it deforms by the same amount of force applied perpendicularly -- for example, granite, or salt under sedimentation.
3) How to program a Hamilton STAR liquid handling robot! It's really simple, conceptually, but whoever designed the programming interface... well, I have a feeling there were a bunch of decisions that were made "just for now to get things working" that ended up codified in the end. Frankly, it feels rather amateurish, especially for a company that sells several-hundred-thousand-dollar robots.
There's something C-like in the design... for instance, there's a way to loop over a sequence of positions on the robot, like a Python for-loop. The resemblances are more than skin-deep -- sequences in this language act much like generators, in that they're kind of functions that return positions in, well, a sequence. However, unlike Python generators, sequences have an explicit pointer that can be viewed and manipulated. Moreover, it *isn't set by the language* whether the pointer stays at the end of the sequence at the end of a loop or goes back to the beginning. You can do either. But you have to choose. Urgh.
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