June 29, 2016 at 02:52AM

Today I Learned: 1) ...how to mop. There was a bit of a flood in the lab, which needed cleaning up.... I learned that it really helps to have one of those squeezy thingies or rolly thingys for squeegying the water out of mops, but that you can do it by hand if you really have to. It's fascinating watching the mop fibers as you squeeze them out -- you squeeze them, and they start leaking water everywhere, but as soon as you release it you can see it instantly dry out as it sucks water back into the interior. Also, our lab floor is disgustingly dirty. That or our old mops are disgustingly dirty.... 2) The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is, in fact, responsible for many lab safety standards. Not all of them, though. There are a lot of agencies responsible for various bits of laboratory safety in the US. Educational institutions mostly follow OSHA guidelines, but it's voluntary and decided on a state-by-state basis. 3) So, Hegel is a pretty weird philospher as far as I'm concerned. Most of his theories involve things like historical dialectics and movements of change and other things that seem too ontologically unreal to me to take particularly seriously. In particular, Hegel talks a lot about the master-slave relationship. Today I learned that the master-slave relationship, at least in large part, does not refer to a master person and a slave person. It refers, in metaphor (at least according to some interpretations!), to two parts within one person, which embody a kind of complicated self-relationship that Hegel found important... honestly, it's pretty complex, and I find it hard to follow. Still, at least I'm now ever-so-slightly less ignorant of Hegel's philosophy now.