Fun Watching Paint Dry

A strip of paint

“It was a fun read,” I said to my supervisor, referring to a paper I just digested about paint drying. As you probably know if you follow the blog, I’m doing a research project about paint drying. The paper is about paint drying in 1D, I’m doing my project in 3D. Both involved watching actual paint dry. Well, maybe not the paper since it’s numerical in nature, but I bet the authors have done the watching just to make sure.

“Ah, so you like these kinds of stuff.” We spent the next fifteen minutes or so discussing aspects of paint drying with me asking questions and him answering them and showing me his previous work about paint and how they dry. I stored the information on my mind, knowing that they’ll prove useful the next time I spend four hours in the lab watching paint dry.

Well, that pretty much sums up yesterday. Yeah, yeah, I know, why the heck do I want to do a research project about the drying of paint? To be honest, I applied to do a research project here not knowing what kind of project I’ll get and I can’t really choose. But that aside, let me share with you something that I read recently:

Scientists are involved in all kinds of research. Sure, there are those popular ones like stem cells, renewable energy and the like. However, for every one of those, there are lots of others that normal people might think of as less ‘colourful’ but each of them still have their own importance and significance to the world.

Not really an exact quotation, but I can’t find where I read it so that’ll do. In any case, I learnt lots of useful techniques which I’ve probably mentioned before like finite difference analysis, linear stability, asymptotic analysis, how to use Mathematica etc. And all these are general in the sense that they will be applicable to a lot of other stuffs that I’ll encounter in the future and I’ll probably use them again.

This summer, a lot of people I know are working in industry and gaining experience. A number of the rest are doing banking and earning lots of money. Some have even started work for real (hey Adam!) and some are doing nothing (hello, my next year’s project partner). As for me, I’m glad I’m doing this, even if I’m describing it as like watching paint dry.

Yaz.