Microscopy

I'm working through some exercises I found suggested in a book, Adventures with a Microscope by Richard Headstrom. I'm still in the free Kindle sample portion of the book but I can see purchasing this (for only $8.76). It's a way for me to focus and do little, practical things step-by-step.

This exercise is creating and then photographing salt crystals. I dissolved some salt in a couple tablespoons of hot water. I then put a couple drops on a microscope slide and let it evaporate. The crystals formed and I photographed one of them.

I found that the most effective technique for this was to use what is called "darkfield microscopy." In this case (and they do make dedicated darkfield condensers) it involved taking a 32mm round disk which has about a 13mm opaque disk in the middle of it. They come in various sizes and styles for different techniques. I'm still experimenting with the set I got which looks similar to this:



This was shot using the 10x objective (for 100x overall magnification, not counting how it may appear larger still depending on what size monitor you are viewing it on). What the darkfield filter disk does is block out the direct light from the middle of the condenser. The light that spills through from the sides then illuminates the object from the sides thus giving a more 3D effect. And, of course, light objects on a dark background tend to stand out better and show more detail, depending upon the subject.



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Nice shot. 

Okay, like I said earlier, I'm getting to0 wizened to throw virtual matches on cans of internet gasoline. But I just couldn't resist commenting on this video.

And don't get me wrong, I think Oliver is a good fellow. And I don't think he (as a scientist) is as squeamish as his subscribers. But he must cater to them and says so. So instead of plucking a spike off a living sea urchin in order to study it (and it's likely he himself has dissected dozens of frogs and such), he found ones that had washed onto the beach.

And I'm fine with that. I'm not for being cruel..even to a sea urchin if there is an alternative. And what he was doing wasn't serious research but for fun. Different context. Yes, sometimes lab rates are killed for the betterment of humans. That's the reality.

But, geez, I read all the Snowflake comments under the video. "Oh, thank you Oliver, for being so kind to the animals." You see, I just had to throw a match onto this idiotic fire, although I don't expect my comment to last long.

If anyone can make sea urchin palatable, I'm supposing it is the Japanese.

I'd never heard of Hamachi. Apparently it is "a type of sushi-grade yellowtail fish." I'm assuming all the yellowtail fish used are free-range.

Ooops… maybe not, according to that article:



Aren't many Americans being raised for greater fat content?

I'm certainly on board with the "be kind to animals" meme. But with some caveats:

1) Humans are not just animals that are more evolved. That is, there is a difference between humans and all other animals.
2) Moral posturing about sea urchins means little if you support abortion and are, in practice, very mean and rude to people who don't share your ideology and/or your pronoun preference.
3) The minute you stop eating and breathing (thus you stop despoiling sacred Mother Earth) is the moment I will take your moral posturing seriously.

Looks yummy, if you ask me.

I really don't like being an internet troll, even in a good cause. I've seen plenty of trolls in my time. It's one of the cheapest, scuzziest thrills that exist. It takes no brains. And usually the trolls are parroting liberal talking points. It's just their psychic energy (their angst, their self-hate...maybe even their boredom) being bludgeoned over your head because it reminds them that they're alive. Nothing can make you feel more alive than a good two-minute hate. Or was that five minutes in the book? I forget.

But, honest to god, the world is such a revolving cluster of stupidity in every terrestrial orbit that it can get to you. We are surrounded by stupid.

And I don't mean the usual stupid. To a liberal internet troll, you are stupid if you don’t believe their dogma. Much like a Scientologist (or any religious zealot), they can circumvent having to prove their own beliefs simply by reassuring themselves that the beliefs of others are wrong.

That's not where I'm coming from. This isn't a right/wrong situation necessarily. It's become a sane/insane one. I can live with people believing differently than I do, politically or otherwise. But the kind of "differences" infecting our culture are a foot fungus borne of insanity. It's not a difference of opinion. It's the difference between living either inside or outside a mental institution. And right now it seems the inmates are running the asylum.

I can live and let live. But I can't live and let live with just sheer insanity. And that's what we are facing.

That really does relate to the idea of a "social contagion," the words used by Jordan Peterson in his videos.



A physics analogy to explain the left. A first. But I think it works. Graphite is typically used to slow or control fusion in a reactor. Spray them with a layer of graphite and then stick on chicken feathers? I think the logistics of it faces some problems however. But certainly we've seen enough liberal melt-downs out there.

"Science" is sanitized and sold today as a dispassionate, objective, fact-seeking look at nature. Nothing could be further from the truth and a book such as this is a reminder.

"Science" is typically academic men doing battle with theories rather than swords. It's the building of reputations rather than a putting together brick-by-brick a wall of facts (which, indeed, is often the useful outcome). The truth of what they say is often secondary to simply refuting an archenemy scientist. (And anyone who refutes your theories, and thus buffets your reputation, is generally an archenemy, deserving of ridicule and scorn.)

We first delve into the story of Dutchman Antonie van Leeuwenhoek who was a pioneering microscopist and generally a good, if odd, bloke. We eventually move to France's Pasteur who I never knew was such an egomaniac. But he's a Frenchman. I should have guessed.

We then move on (although these last two overlap) to the German, Robert Koch, who was perhaps rare in that he was a careful, humble man...quite out of place in the academic world of flame-throwers, egomaniacs, and curmudgeons. Assuming that de Kruif's portrait is accurate, he was quite a worthy fellow.

Germ theory was new as was the discovery of the little microscopic bugs. Microbes were first seen with the earliest crude optics (although no doubt Leeuwenhoek would object to this characterization since his were quite refined for the time). Ideas about what they were, how they got there, and what caused diseases were even cruder.

Slowly but surely answers starting coming to light. No, the microbes (life itself) did not spontaneously generate. But surely every creature has a parent. It is impossible the idea that a microbe (some microbes) simply splits in half in order to reproduce. And this idea caused great gnashing of teeth until it was resolved, although there are so many microbes (single-celled or multicellular) that any grand theories proposed, no matter how accurate to the subject matter at hand, didn't usually turn out to cover all cases.

I'm about halfway into this book and I could recommend it as a general read for the subject of history and science. It's written in a bit of an odd way but I think de Kruif's method makes it more interesting than it would have been otherwise.

The concept of "born into a world of superstitions where Galileo was silenced for life when he proved that the earth rotated the sun" is laid on a little thick at times. Fast-forward to our age when "science" has declared that a man can have a vagina and if you don't agree, you may suffer the modern fate of Galileo. Of course, this book was written in 1926. But, still, the normal materialist stories of science-vs-superstition were getting a little old, even back then. Microscopists, heal thyselves.

But it's interesting to consider that despite the billions poured into the Apollo program (and I'm glad they did), we actually learned very little (other than advancing the underlying technologies). But with meticulously hand-ground lenses, van Leeuwenhoek discovered an entire world about which no one had the first idea even existed.

And although it's interesting to learn (or further confirm) from the Apollo program the composition of the moon and where it might have come from, these facts are inconsequential. But the discovery of microbes was yugely consequential. As the opening of the book states: "...microscopic critters can inflict upon humankind torments and agonies unsuspected, sufferings unheard of, pains and diseases yet unnamed...all Nature is over-run and covered with a kind of leprosy." And they were (unknowingly) essential for the making of wine, beer, and bread.

There was great promise at the time that once it was learned what caused a disease, it could be cured. And in many cases this was the case (or allowed measures to be taken that reduced the risk or harm). This was an exciting time. And although the existence of the Higgs boson is probably (like the history of the moon) a mere intellectual curiosity, the discovery of microbes was (and continues to be) of immediate use and concern for mankind.


Robert Koch

Another salt crystal. Nothing spectacular. I'm just trying out the new adapter for the Nikon.



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This is a cross section of a plant stem. I'm shooting these all in RAW on the Nikon. That's a good thing because this one was very over-exposed. But shooting in RAW allows you do salvage some pretty poor exposures:



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This is a wider shot of the same subject (plant stem cross section) seen above. This one I did expose properly.



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This is just practice. I'm checking for sharpness, etc. I fixed the focus problem by adjusting the "stage" stop limit. The stage is the platform that the glass slides sits on. You don't actually move the lens when you focus. You move the entire stage. And there is an adjustable stop so that you don't inadvertently smash the lenses into the glass. I gave myself more room to focus with the downside being that I have to be careful to remember to readjust the focus when I remove the DSLR from the microscope and change to ocular-only mode.

This is a detail of the above photo of a cross section of a pine needle taken with the 60x (for 600x overall enlargement) Plan (higher quality) objective lens. I think it turned out pretty well. I love the translucent ruby-like quality of that central cell or structure. It has the look of stained glass.

You can play "Where's Waldo" by trying to see if you can see which part of the above image that this is.



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I might be getting the best images I've had yet using this new adapter for my Nikon. It's certainly easy to use. And if there was some concern that the weight of the camera would be a problem mounted in the left eyepiece, that proved to be not an issue. This is a small, light camera to begin with. And without a lens (and with the tiny adapter screwed on), it is only 17.8 ounces which is nothing at all.