Day VI: Visual Boot Camp Begins!

Yep, the infamous VP 'boot camp' began today for Jane, Erika and I. Matt's gone off to football camp so it's just the three of us for a while. We began the day, following the staff meeting, with a bit more lifting tasks. What are we, slave labor? Oh yeah...

Anyways, our first task was to bring some tables into our lab so the entire department had a place to sit for the boot camp presentation. After that, we went down to the first floor and picked up some special equipment that had just arrived from France. It was a set of three special targets used to test the clarity and quality of lenses in almost any sort of optical device, something of extreme importance to the Center. Therefore, we return once again to the VP mantra. 'It's fragile and expensive, don't break it!'

Following that, we took seats in the lab, grabbed a bagel and some coffee (Ah, free food....) and opened our notebooks for the presentation. The boot camp PowerPoint is actually something along the lines of 285 slides, and we managed to get through about 187 of them
before we had to leave today. Yep, besides a brief jump over to Crossroads for lunch, I did not leave the lab today.

It actually was very painless. There was a great deal of information presented, but Jeff and Andy did an excellent job with it. Even if, to paraphrase Andy, they 'lacked the ability to focus on one topic for more than thirty seconds.' It was quite entertaining, and also very informative, because the questions and discussion led to information that might not have been discussed normally.

The PowerPoint covered everything I could ever want to know about the eye, its structure, its movements, and research done on it. We discussed the parts of the eye, the muscles that move it, the individual types of cells that allow us to see, how poor vision is caused and how it can be corrected, the specific types of eye movements, what they do for us, and how scientists have gone about tracking these movements down the years. From magnets to lasers, from mirrors to cameras, and even...cocaine and hallucinogens!? Yeah, I was surprised too. We did a few small tests to illustrate certain concepts (How to give yourself temporary glaucoma, for instance), and the constant stream of information was surprisingly easy to process. I am extremely interested in what's coming on the next 100 slides, though. Hopefully, it will go as smoothly as today.

Oh, yes. My homework assignment. When we were discussing the tear layer (the barrier that keeps the eye from drying out), we were presented with a bit of contradiction. The data that came from Jeff stated that the mucin layer was ~.5 microns in size. However, the slide said that this layer was ~.05 microns. I was assigned the duty of resolving this discrepancy. I fear, however, that I will be rather unhelpful in this task. Though aided by the resources of Google Scholar and Wikipedia, I was unable to find a definitive number that indicated mucin layer thickness. I did find one paper, published by a quartet of Japanese scientists who believed that the "Three-layer theory" was false, that there were only the mucin layer and the lipid layer, but even they failed to provide the data I needed.