June 07, 2016 at 04:30AM

Today I Learned: 1) The Windsor Beauties are a set of 10 portraits from the 1660s of the the most beautiful women in the court of King Charles II. It seems Charles took after Zeus's style of rule, except he somehow didn't get into serious trouble with his wife...? In any case, wooing King Charles and bearing his children was an efficient way for a beautiful woman of the era to gain power, prestige, and a title, and many, many women pursued that path. 2) Teachers know way more about classroom politics than I thought. Also, high school is way more political than I remember. 3) ...what the inside of a PTC-100 Thermal Cycler (with heated bonnet) looks like! I had some fun repairing one of these today... by which I mean I reset a screw on one and failed to fix the lid.... The PTC-100 is, in my humble opinion, a quite well-put-together little thermal cycler. First off, it *is* quite little -- about the same overall size as a toaster oven, though taller and narrower. The lid detaches with two screws, which is probably necessary because it comes with two different lid types (one heated and one unheated). The heated lid has a heat plate that can be adjusted by a screw controlled by a plastic wheel accessible from the outside. The innards of the lid can be accessed by simply screwing down the heat plate until it falls out. Unfortunately, one of the PTCs I wanted to repair has a broken plastic-wheel-screwy-thingy on the lid... which means I can't really get into the lid to fix it... this is, I admit, something of a design flaw. The frame of the main body comes off with just four screws, exposing a board of electronics, a second board that seems to control I/O, and the thermal cycling block itself. The I/O board detaches from the frame with a single wire and from the other electronics with two more, but it's tethered to the thermal cycling block (and through it, the power supply) by a hot-glued power connector. Again, something of an annoyance. Everything else comes out quite nicely, though -- the power cycling block can be detached by taking out six screws accessible from the outside, and then it slides right out in one big piece. Very convenient. PTC-100s are all over Ebay, and they're pretty cheap for a thermal cycler ($150-$800). The interface is pretty clunky and outdated, but it works just fine, and if the two I got are any indication, it's a good line. I *have* heard that they have a tendancy to burn out... but they do have a pair of fuses that presumably can be replaced in just that event. Aaaand that's probably way more than you wanted to know about the PTC-100 thermal cycler. But you didn't come here for ordinary facts, did you?