Inky Terminology

[Tinjapan]

Viscosity is resistance to flow.  The greater the viscosity, the greater the resistance to flow.

[bunnspecial]

On 4/22/2021 at 2:48 PM, LizEF said:

  No worries.  Your photos brought back memories of the I-Chem lab (instrument chemistry) where I used to work.  (I was in IT, not the lab, but I designed apps for the lab to record their data and to automatically generate the needed reports to the customer, so I learned quite a bit about their work - though more the microbiology side than the chemistry stuff.)

 

Ahh, you're the one who makes me regularly swear and say "Why do they have to do it that way?"

 

Actually, if you were doing it in-house it was probably far better than what HP/Agilent or whoever writes.

 

Tucked back, neglected in a corner of our instrument lab we had a Mattson FT-IR that no one ever used until one of the analytical chemists asked me if they could actually "get their hands dirty" with things like adjusting raw operating parameters on an FT-IR(it wasn't the easiest thing to use, but stuff like mirror velocity and other things that you normally don't even think about were right there, just like with the Varian GC-MS-MS that I used all the time but no one else wanted to touch) . In any case, I'd get backed into a corner on the software sometimes on that. Mattson went away about 20 years ago-it was a company that was started by a couple of Nicolet guys who thought they could build a better IR than Nicolet-and was later bought back up by Nicolet. Two of the engineers for the company went out and started their own business maintaining Mattsons, and more than once I pulled out my phone and called them to ask a question while I was sitting there running it. It was always fun when I'd do that, the person I was helping would inevitably say "Who did you just call?" and see their face when I said either "The guy who designed this instrument" or "The guy who wrote the software" depending on who had answered the phone .

 

Depending on context, I'll call myself an analytical chemist, instrumental chemist, or chromatographer-I can say all of those honestly but each is increasingly more informative about just where exactly my strongest skills are. The manufacturers have done a really good job of making things almost "appliance like" to where you don't really have to understand what's going on(UV-VIS and FT-IR are the two best examples of that, but increasingly GC and GC-MS) and although it's good for them to be more accessible I think something is lost in the process.

[LizEF]

56 minutes ago, bunnspecial said:

Ahh, you're the one who makes me regularly swear and say "Why do they have to do it that way?"

No.  My users defined how the software worked (the same people who entered the data into the software).   See next...

 

59 minutes ago, bunnspecial said:

Actually, if you were doing it in-house it was probably far better than what HP/Agilent or whoever writes.

Yes, but I didn't make software to run the equipment.  At most, I imported data from the equipment.  And I only designed software for the microbiology labs, not chemistry (their equipment captured almost everything and the cost-benefit of designing software for what little it didn't wasn't worth it).  So really, I don't have that much exposure - just around some logbooks they used and casual conversations.

 

1 hour ago, bunnspecial said:

UV-VIS and FT-IR are the two best examples of that, but increasingly GC and GC-MS

   Stop it!  You're making me feel like my boss is going to come ask me to program something (and I don't even have a boss anymore).

 

Meanwhile, do you also laugh at cop shows with "forensics" labs?

[lapis]

On 4/24/2021 at 10:27 PM, LizEF said:

Meanwhile, do you also laugh at cop shows with "forensics" labs?

I dunno if it's to be rated as a cop show or not but I continually love watching old Medical Detectives jobs and am still awaiting an episode -- whether pre or post DNA days -- which focuses on an FP ink....

[LizEF]

3 hours ago, lapis said:

I dunno if it's to be rated as a cop show or not but I continually love watching old Medical Detectives jobs and am still awaiting an episode -- whether pre or post DNA days -- which focuses on an FP ink....

  Yeah, that would be a fun one for us.

[InesF]

Most important thing first:

I love this thread! There are so many opinions and aspects discussed - great! That's how a community should act! Please take my application at becoming a member of your exquisit thread.

 

The second thing:

Colour, colour intensity, saturation and opacity are fascinating ink properties as they - maybe except opacity - are impressions which rely on our senses and are overlaid by memories, experience and mood. Liz, you are right about the chroma - intensity - saturation dilemma. It is because our visual system works as it works, we cannot resolve it. Physics can go only so far to tell about 'spectral purity' (which is a free translation from the term sigma, describing wavelength distribution from the emission peak maximum).

But that doesn't help much, as it is expressed in chroma as well as in saturation - the first with 'other colour impurity', the second with 'white impurity'.

My suggestion would be: do you like the colour? - use it!  ;)

 

The third:

What had you thought? You like to use fountain pens and have never attended a full physics, an art and a fine handcrafting class?; you do not own a fully equipped laboratory in your living room?; your fridge is not full of chemicals? Who do you think you are? Why do you even think about touching a fountain pen?

:) Haha, ROFL. :)

 

And finally:

As I recognise some of the contributors of this thread from another one, I guess you may be aware about my steadily forming new opinion about ink wetness. And I'm only some weeks away from a new theory about fountain pen nib wetness as well.

Yes, indeed, CSI fountain pen is becoming real! Avoid leaving fingerprints on your pens!

;)

 

[LizEF]

3 hours ago, InesF said:

I love this thread! There are so many opinions and aspects discussed - great! That's how a community should act! Please take my application at becoming a member of your exquisit thread.

You are most welcome in our thread!  It may appear that I've abandoned it, but really I'm just slow.  I've started a document for newbie ink reviewers, composing it locally rather than in the thread, and it's expanded to include broader advice, not just the terms discussed in this thread.  Eventually I'll figure out how to finish it.

 

3 hours ago, InesF said:

The second thing:

....

My suggestion would be: do you like the colour? - use it!

 

3 hours ago, InesF said:

The third:

What had you thought? You like to use fountain pens and have never attended a full physics, an art and a fine handcrafting class?; you do not own a fully equipped laboratory in your living room?; your fridge is not full of chemicals? Who do you think you are? Why do you even think about touching a fountain pen?

Haha, ROFL.

Maybe we should write to GouletPens and ask them when they're going to start carrying lab equipment so we don't have to shop at Fisher Scientific any more.

 

3 hours ago, InesF said:

And finally:

As I recognise some of the contributors of this thread from another one, I guess you may be aware about my steadily forming new opinion about ink wetness. And I'm only some weeks away from a new theory about fountain pen nib wetness as well.

Yes, indeed, CSI fountain pen is becoming real! Avoid leaving fingerprints on your pens!

Yes, your thread has me very interested!  I'm hopeful we can derive from it some advice / training / instruction that will be helpful for newbies (and more experienced users, too, but newbies are my main focus).  The trick will be simplifying what you learn so that a beginner can understand the concepts - once you understand them and teach the rest of us.   No pressure.