Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Science at Sea... with more kittens

The whole secret to doing marine science is cleaning. Sad, but true. See, if you are sending electronics to the bottom of the ocean, you need to place them in a sealed vessel. Sometimes these are made of glass. Ours are made of aluminum. The pressure vessels are sealed by metal-to-metal contact. They have really really flat surfaces and employ o-rings (like your vacuum cleaner, except we keep much better care of them). We wash these surfaces and the o-rings ad nauseam. We wash them with Kimwipes. These are 'delicate task wipers'. They have no fibres which could scratch our surfaces or o-rings. So much of my professional life depends on these Kimwipes. It irks me that my cell phone would not let me text 'Kimwipes' as it assumes (correctly, but that's not the point here) that I cannot spell. So, you'll understand the need to post the cat-in-a-box ... of Kimwipes.

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