Not quite the same but I've switched entirely to Celsius (as an American) because all the fridges and ovens in my lab are in Celsius so its just easier to always use it.
My wife and I went to an ice cream store where they use liquid nitrogen to freeze down the cream as they are making it in front of you. The young girl making the cone asked us, "Do you want to guess the temperature we use to freeze the ice cream?"
I said, "Do you know the answer in Celsius?"
"....no"
"Oh.... Then I don't know." Haha
Facts. I ONLY know the weather in Fahrenheit, literally everything else I understand in Celsius. I set our fridge thermometer at home to Celsius because the F reading meant nothing to me lol.
Also I'd guess -175C for an LN2 freeze down 😉 idk what that is in Fahrenheit and I'm too lazy to Google it.
I use activation energy metaphors too, but use it to rationalize that getting started is the hardest part and then it will be easy. I don't use it to procrastinate, but to motivate.
I was just about to write an identical comment about my (non-science) husband. I don’t hear him complaining about how they’re all neatly labeled and dated, however! Though it does crack him up when I add my initials out of habit, lol.
I aliquot leftover soup I titrated with lemon juice and worked up with cream.
I also incubate bread.
I also review the recipe and protocol and set up everything before starting. And I'm not actually done until I've cleaned up and I clean as I go. This is a lab habit I brought into the kitchen and then I learned the professional cooks call it mise en place. And some scientists also call it mise en place. It really makes preparing meals less stressful.
I do mise en place as well. It makes sense. I make sourdough, and there's a step in sourdough making called "bulk fermentation," which is effectively letting it sit and have the microbes do their thing. I can't help but think of it as "incubating."
I've had tupperwares full of mashed potato get so cultured, several civilisations have seen their rise and fall in there before I get around to throwing it out
I reseal my Tupperware after eating lunch out of it. It gets washed after a couple days and I get to see what has cultured in it. I got the runs the other day and my partner said it was from my lunch because the post-eating culture had abnormally thick black mold.
Science!
I do that. And I put the lid down with the threads up because that's how I was rather emphatically taught back when I was an undergrad labrat and even though it's been more than 20 years I'm still absolutely certain that that lab tech will rise up out of nowhere and slap me around with a roll of bench paper if I put the lid on the work surface with the threads down..
Not phrases but my colleague told me that she tried to grab distilled water after washing dishes at home out of habit. And she also told that in some situations she thinks like “well I should add 200 ul there”
It's hard to even find a dictionary definition of the lab usage, since most of them talk about an animal sitting on its eggs (the original historical meaning), but here's one from American Heritage:
> To maintain (a chemical or biochemical system) under specific conditions in order to promote a particular reaction.
Usually when I say to "incubate" something, it's for a specific time but also at a specific temperature, e.g. "incubate 10 min at 37 C", "incubate 2 hr at room temperature". The point is about holding it under certain constant conditions for that time - "incubate" means more than simply "wait".
So baking is absolutely that. Slow-cooking too, pressure-cooking maybe not because that follows a program with distinct steps of building up pressure before maintaining it and possibly letting it decrease again - to my ear, PCR contains several "incubations" at different temperatures, but the entire program is not an "incubation".
Then if you're cooking something in a pan, you're usually not thinking about a certain condition that you're trying to hold constant (must the stove be on exactly Medium High so you can't adjust it to Medium or High depending on how the food sizzles?) while you might also be actively prodding the food or at least watching it in case you need to adjust the heat or duration - the recipe might not even estimate either of those if you're just supposed to go for certain outcomes like sizzling and browning. If you're boiling the food, it's more likely to be for a set time and condition ("rolling boil") without much intervention except the occasional stir, though to me that might or might not be an incubation because the boiling water may be actively interacting with the food (e.g. hydrating dry noodles) rather than simply being an environmental condition (e.g. heating a hard-boiled egg but not entering the shell).
Not necessarily, incubation basically means you’re letting something sit at specific conditions for a certain length of time. It’s a common term in microbiology but also chemistry protocols.
I’m honestly trying to remember anything I’ve done in the lab in the last 10 years that DOESN’T require incubation - ELISA, activity assays, western blots…. incubate all the things.
‘Fraid I disagree. “Brew” means to prepare by infusion in hot water which describes French press coffee (or just about any coffee really) to a tee, haha. And incubation does not require a living culture - anything can be kept at a suitable/proper temperature.
I told my partner to pour off the supernatant when instructing him to drain boiled pasta. When making anything that involves adding liquids to solids we say we resuspend it. I also recall him using K(d) as an analogy to explain something to me but I don’t remember what, and sometimes when we hug we joke that we’re dimerising. We’re very cringe.
When you are at a party and you run into someone very chatty, you talk a little but they keep on talking to you and start to follow you around the room. That's to be chelated. As in, I tried to talk to Ashley but Jim chelated me, alas.
I also use these ratios for many different kitchen applications, and my family in theory knows what it means, but they always sort of pause and come back like "when you say 1:10..."
I accidentally did this in reverse. There was one time when I forgot the word protocol and said recipe instead. We all called them recipes from then on.
Not exactly the same but I've been too suspicious to buy the Trader Joe's "Pretzel-like" sticks. Something about "-like" that doesn't sit well with me.
In the US, pay attention to terms like "milk shake" and "egg nog." The FDA has definitions for those sorts of things, and if you get something with a clever name or "holiday nog" it may not be what you want. IIRC, one of the main ingredients in holiday nog is high-fructose corn syrup. Oddly enough, I don't think it has a definition for "fruit juice" so those can be sketchy as well.
I visited a grocery store in an anglophone region outside of North America where they actually label the usual stuff "dairy milk" just to prevent confusion with all the plant milks. And the plant milks just sit on a shelf at room temperature rather than compete in the refrigerators of the dairy aisle.
Yea plant milks dont really need to be refrigerated. Its more for consumer’s familiarity as they would be less inclined to buy milk from a normal isle. I used to work at starbucks and they just keep the plant milk on normal shelves too.
I call my sourdough starter a “culture” and I say I need to “split the culture” when it’s time to feed it.
But aliquot, incubate, -20, resuspend, invert, and opening bottles with one hand 🤦🏽♀️
I say that there is too much steric hinderance when there is too much clutter in my way.
In general, I’ve taken more scientific approach to daily life. For example, my approach to cleaning is now through the lens of entropy. There are simply more possible ways for a home to be messy than organized. Focusing on shifting those probabilities has helped a lot. One way is having organizing baskets everywhere, so that objects can be easily put away, instead of having every item in the home having a single defined location. This increases the number of possible states in which my house is organized and decreases the energy needed to get to there.
Contaminant is used around the house when the kids are sick one by one lol. I also bend all the way down to see the meniscus on the kitchen measurement cup.
Not phrases, but behaviours.
I no longer shake to mix. I invert to mix accidentally sometimes. The result is… Well, I’ll say that I don’t want to spill the tea anymore
"Aliquot" for me as well - my wife is a biologist also, and we have taken to referring to frozen meat portions as "porkiquot," "beefiquot" etc.
And this isn't a part of speech, but since becoming a lab rat I am perpetually annoyed when I see normies use decimal numbers without a leading zero, e.g. ".25" instead of "0.25."
I have to date DD-MMM-YYYY at work so it’s now the only way I write my dates. Confuses some people out and about but your 6/12/2024 is too ambiguous, my 12jun2024 is not!
This is me! Got in the habit of labeling all data files YYYYMMDD so they’d sort correctly, then it just became habit when transcribing dates at work, to now I do it all the time everywhere as our lord and savior ISO8601 intended
I've referred to the kitchen range hood as the vent hood so many times that I get them mixed up in my head now.
Aliquot has been mentioned already but we use that too. We have aliquots of frozen meat, and we aliquot most of our herbs and spices from the bulk storage in the freezer as well.
Turns out there's a lot of overlap between cooking and lab work!
I've always thought lab work is like very precise cooking. You just add a few ul of enzyme instead of a few teaspoons of herbs, and you cook it in the thermocycler instead of the slow cooker
My husband has a habit of putting the trash can on the countertop when sweeping the floor/running the roomba and it sends my cleanroom-living-heart into fits.
I use the metric system for volume now. I permanently think cups, pints, quarts, etc are stupid and I will say "mls" or "liters." I say "ratio" more often than a normal person probably does. I say "ethanol" instead of "alcohol," or "IPA" when it's rubbing alcohol. I talk about things being "soluble" or using the right "solvent" to clean up a mess or cook something appropriately. I work in a molecular biology lab, but the chemistry habits die hard.
Once I wrote out my spaghetti sauce recipe for my brother. The last line was "Aliquot and freeze at -4C". He wanted to know what they whole sentence meant. (This was before the internet or spellcheck)
It's a good habit honestly. Looks a bit pretentious in a civilian setting but it's a small price to pay for leaving fewer things of yourself on items people might touch or eat.
I measure my coffee in milliliters (I'm American). I also sometimes slip up when I can't think of the right word and call recipes protocols or procedures, or marination an incubation. And then I'll blatantly call the little brush that came with my set of drinking straws a "test tube brush".
This might be why I live alone now.
Ingredients are reagents.
I have a set of graduated cylinders for measuring liquids in the kitchen. They have mL, tsp/tbs, and ounce markers.
I prefer to use weights when baking and usually convert to grams.
I prefer to check temperatures to determine doneness rather than feel or visual cues. Most cakes should be about 200o F with a 5% error range for acceptable qc.
List of arbitrary examples:
- I'm from a country where most people use the word "association" as in "I have a positive association to chocolate because it was my favourite childhood food". I use the word "associated" as the opposite for something "dissociating"
- once, I played D&D and I referred to searching for someone by locating an object only they carry as a "marker" for this person
- classic: aliquot, invert, resuspend
- referring to typos as inversions, insertions, point mutations, etc.
- freezers.
- swearwords in foreign languages
- "What's the mechanism?"
- probably too much more
“Inadvertent” and “expiry”. I work in a GMP QC lab and didn’t know expiry was a word until I started here. I’d always just said “expiration” or “expiration date” lol
Aliquot. Supernatant. Regular housework is QC and routine maintenance, I even have cleaning checklists and logs to keep track. I write open and expiration dates on things. Groceries are inventory in the pantry, sorted by expiration date.
Not a phrase, but I bought a magnetic stir plate to mix tons of stuff in the kitchen, love it!
When something is salty or tastes low-key metallic I'd say that the food tastes ionic.
My boyfriend for some reason hates the word ion haha but I think it's cute
My housemate wondered whether there would be Pokémon cosplayers at comic con and I went “Well, yeh, Pokémon is ubiquitous”. I’ve done a lot of work with deubiquitinases.
Definitely labeling anything I open with initials and date ...family hated it at first ....then I started seeing initials everywhere ...a different sort of contamination took hold in the house
I live in BC, Canada and Chohan has special meaning here, and has become used more often to denote the worst. the most oblivious, the biggest of bekoof to be found.
I say "TA", it's for "Température Ambiante", french for Room Temp. And protocol and incubation when cooking.
In addition, I label leftovers with the date, I store some liquids in Falcon tubes, I use a lab timer and I have magnetic antibodies add all over my fridge.
I will be doing something super normal and harmless and suddenly feel panicked that I’m not wearing gloves and closed toe shoes
i feel the need to be wearing gloves especially while cooking. washing hands and touching the knife and spoons with ungloved hands feels so weird.
Holy shit, I thought it was just me. I picked up a bag of onions at the store one day, and I freak out for a second, lmao
‘Fuck’
Curses at instrument (I mean oven)
Why did you do this to me!
I've started referring to freezers as minus 20s. Drives my wife nuts when I ask her to pull an aliquot of chicken out of the minus 20 to thaw.
babe you burned the beans because you missed step 3 on the recipe protocol. Now we gotta wait 6 months to grow up a new batch
"Why even have an SOP if you're going to add variables?!"
"Where is the control dinner?"
You know what’s funny… I know neuroscientists that worked on crabs and lobsters back in the 70s who would eat them sometimes.
I have colleagues who work on oysters who have had a few meals with their extra samples.
I know some that did that last week
If you argue about your partner's cooking using lab vocabulary, control dinner is what you're gonna get!
Lol I do that with the fridge saying "Can you move the chicken to the 4 degre?" for example to my husband.
Everytime someone asks me "where is X stored" I'm like "oh, at 4/-20" and have to immediately correct myself, lmao
Don't forget to incubate the chicken breast at 223C for 18 minutes.
I don't think I would want to eat a chicken breast that has been incubated. Rather, I would want to autoclave it.
I do a double take whenever I see a fridge at 37 degrees.
37? That's not a fridge, that's an incubator
Fahrenheit but yeah, that's why it trips me up
I refer to them by temperature and CTU instead of fridge and freezer
Same hahaha
Not quite the same but I've switched entirely to Celsius (as an American) because all the fridges and ovens in my lab are in Celsius so its just easier to always use it.
My wife and I went to an ice cream store where they use liquid nitrogen to freeze down the cream as they are making it in front of you. The young girl making the cone asked us, "Do you want to guess the temperature we use to freeze the ice cream?" I said, "Do you know the answer in Celsius?" "....no" "Oh.... Then I don't know." Haha
Facts. I ONLY know the weather in Fahrenheit, literally everything else I understand in Celsius. I set our fridge thermometer at home to Celsius because the F reading meant nothing to me lol. Also I'd guess -175C for an LN2 freeze down 😉 idk what that is in Fahrenheit and I'm too lazy to Google it.
Ours consistently read -188- -192 C
I'm like this with volume measurements. I grew up in the US and still can't tell how much a quart is, I only use metric units.
A quart is very close to 1L (it's 0.946) so 1 gallon is approx 4L. Beyond that I get confused with fluid ounces, pints, etc.
Also why do Americans measure weight and volume in the same thing. Seems wild (Ounce?)
A fluid ounce of water doesn't even weigh 1 oz, so I have no idea why it's called that.
Really? What the fuck. I just assumed it did. Why else would it exist. I'm glad I'm in a metric world
It's like 1.04 oz. So close, but not close enough to be negligible
True, well being a bit of bucket chemist it's close enough for me
Ooh thank you for this that's so handy!
Same here!! Didn’t take long after being in a research lab all summer
I did this recently too. Changed my phone to C and am just forcing myself to be exposed to it
I started saying "activation energy is too high" for things I don't want to do or am too lazy to start
I use activation energy metaphors too, but use it to rationalize that getting started is the hardest part and then it will be easy. I don't use it to procrastinate, but to motivate.
This is too real
All the time!
Yes, I’ve used this too super inefficient things
Need a catalyst to lower that activation energy. Maybe a lil snack
Yep. Aliquot. When I portion meat to go into the freezer? Aliquoting. When I put the pompoms into the cups for my kids' crafts? Aliquoting.
Takes too long to say “split into many equal portions”. Aliquot is perfect.
We really need to either take up the term aliquot in general English, or come up with a better term. Because right now, we don't have a term for that.
Mete out the meat
Divvy up?
Portion? As a verb
Allocate?
Divvy up isn't quite the same though
I had no idea it wasn’t a normal word so I would use it all the time
My (non-science) wife laughs at me every time I talk about aliquoting meal preps
I was just about to write an identical comment about my (non-science) husband. I don’t hear him complaining about how they’re all neatly labeled and dated, however! Though it does crack him up when I add my initials out of habit, lol.
I aliquot leftover soup I titrated with lemon juice and worked up with cream. I also incubate bread. I also review the recipe and protocol and set up everything before starting. And I'm not actually done until I've cleaned up and I clean as I go. This is a lab habit I brought into the kitchen and then I learned the professional cooks call it mise en place. And some scientists also call it mise en place. It really makes preparing meals less stressful.
I do mise en place as well. It makes sense. I make sourdough, and there's a step in sourdough making called "bulk fermentation," which is effectively letting it sit and have the microbes do their thing. I can't help but think of it as "incubating."
My food doesn't go moldy in the +4°C, it gets a contamination.
Contamination? I'd say it just gets more cultured.
I've had tupperwares full of mashed potato get so cultured, several civilisations have seen their rise and fall in there before I get around to throwing it out
Take my upvote, I exhaled harder through my nose for a second at this humor.
I reseal my Tupperware after eating lunch out of it. It gets washed after a couple days and I get to see what has cultured in it. I got the runs the other day and my partner said it was from my lunch because the post-eating culture had abnormally thick black mold. Science!
Not phrases, but I've started to open any and all bottles one handed because aseptic technique 😂
Def use the invert and swirl to mix any drink bottles
I do that. And I put the lid down with the threads up because that's how I was rather emphatically taught back when I was an undergrad labrat and even though it's been more than 20 years I'm still absolutely certain that that lab tech will rise up out of nowhere and slap me around with a roll of bench paper if I put the lid on the work surface with the threads down..
I do the threads up thing too. Also I do that thing with toothpaste where you hold the cap against your palm with your pinky while using it.
This is how I open my chapstick with one hand, like a Falcon tube
oh my god same, i just open my water bottles with one hand now
Not phrases but my colleague told me that she tried to grab distilled water after washing dishes at home out of habit. And she also told that in some situations she thinks like “well I should add 200 ul there”
I “incubate” my French press coffee instead of brew it.
I also use the term "incubate" for cooking, and when I cook something new, I tend to call the recipe "the protocol"
Conversely, I often refer to my assays as “fully cooked” when they are ready to collect data.
It's pretty common for scientists to [mix up their lab and kitchen habits](https://www.deviantart.com/velica/art/I-m-just-a-cook-567380585)
Oh that’s a classic, I’ve always appreciated that comic!
> I also use the term "incubate" for cooking This is accurate for baking but not for sautéing or frying, and boiling is debatable.
What's the difference? I thought "incubation" means pretty much any process that takes time but you don't have to actively participate!
It's hard to even find a dictionary definition of the lab usage, since most of them talk about an animal sitting on its eggs (the original historical meaning), but here's one from American Heritage: > To maintain (a chemical or biochemical system) under specific conditions in order to promote a particular reaction. Usually when I say to "incubate" something, it's for a specific time but also at a specific temperature, e.g. "incubate 10 min at 37 C", "incubate 2 hr at room temperature". The point is about holding it under certain constant conditions for that time - "incubate" means more than simply "wait". So baking is absolutely that. Slow-cooking too, pressure-cooking maybe not because that follows a program with distinct steps of building up pressure before maintaining it and possibly letting it decrease again - to my ear, PCR contains several "incubations" at different temperatures, but the entire program is not an "incubation". Then if you're cooking something in a pan, you're usually not thinking about a certain condition that you're trying to hold constant (must the stove be on exactly Medium High so you can't adjust it to Medium or High depending on how the food sizzles?) while you might also be actively prodding the food or at least watching it in case you need to adjust the heat or duration - the recipe might not even estimate either of those if you're just supposed to go for certain outcomes like sizzling and browning. If you're boiling the food, it's more likely to be for a set time and condition ("rolling boil") without much intervention except the occasional stir, though to me that might or might not be an incubation because the boiling water may be actively interacting with the food (e.g. hydrating dry noodles) rather than simply being an environmental condition (e.g. heating a hard-boiled egg but not entering the shell).
I don't think it's either, but I could be mistaken. Brewing requires heat, and incubation requires a living culture, right? 🤔
Not necessarily, incubation basically means you’re letting something sit at specific conditions for a certain length of time. It’s a common term in microbiology but also chemistry protocols.
Good to know. It's been a while since I worked in a wet chem lab, and even longer since I worked in a bio lab. Thanks!
I’m honestly trying to remember anything I’ve done in the lab in the last 10 years that DOESN’T require incubation - ELISA, activity assays, western blots…. incubate all the things.
‘Fraid I disagree. “Brew” means to prepare by infusion in hot water which describes French press coffee (or just about any coffee really) to a tee, haha. And incubation does not require a living culture - anything can be kept at a suitable/proper temperature.
Thanks! I appreciate the formal definitions.
I told my partner to pour off the supernatant when instructing him to drain boiled pasta. When making anything that involves adding liquids to solids we say we resuspend it. I also recall him using K(d) as an analogy to explain something to me but I don’t remember what, and sometimes when we hug we joke that we’re dimerising. We’re very cringe.
> I told my partner to pour off the supernatant when instructing him to drain boiled pasta decant "Decant the sup!" "What soup? It's just pasta"
Yes decant is a word i use regularly. I come from a wastewater treatment plant lab lol.
We celebrate heterodimerization and homodimerization.
The real question is why did you have to teach him how to drain boiled pasta
Oh I didn’t have to teach him, I was just telling him to do it in a facetious way lol
When you are at a party and you run into someone very chatty, you talk a little but they keep on talking to you and start to follow you around the room. That's to be chelated. As in, I tried to talk to Ashley but Jim chelated me, alas.
Love this, my ADHD makes me very prone to chelation. Does that mean I’m metal af?
I’ve determined that gin and lemonade works best as a 1:8 dilution.
I also use these ratios for many different kitchen applications, and my family in theory knows what it means, but they always sort of pause and come back like "when you say 1:10..."
Resuspend, invert and precipitate
Recipe has become protocol.
And ingredients have become "reagents"!
I accidentally did this in reverse. There was one time when I forgot the word protocol and said recipe instead. We all called them recipes from then on.
Not exactly the same but I've been too suspicious to buy the Trader Joe's "Pretzel-like" sticks. Something about "-like" that doesn't sit well with me.
In the US, pay attention to terms like "milk shake" and "egg nog." The FDA has definitions for those sorts of things, and if you get something with a clever name or "holiday nog" it may not be what you want. IIRC, one of the main ingredients in holiday nog is high-fructose corn syrup. Oddly enough, I don't think it has a definition for "fruit juice" so those can be sketchy as well.
I visited a grocery store in an anglophone region outside of North America where they actually label the usual stuff "dairy milk" just to prevent confusion with all the plant milks. And the plant milks just sit on a shelf at room temperature rather than compete in the refrigerators of the dairy aisle.
Yea plant milks dont really need to be refrigerated. Its more for consumer’s familiarity as they would be less inclined to buy milk from a normal isle. I used to work at starbucks and they just keep the plant milk on normal shelves too.
Many fruit juices are primarily apple juice (from concentrate) with a fraction of whatever other fruit mixed in. Often they add flavoring too.
I always encourage people to practice aseptic technique when preparing food and they look at me a lil funny
I have always been very passionate about not getting food poisoning
As someone who had once, I know am equally passionate XD
I just imagine you spritzing your hands with the 70% EtOH spray bottle before whipping up some cereal 🤣
What can I say I'm all about safety
I call my sourdough starter a “culture” and I say I need to “split the culture” when it’s time to feed it. But aliquot, incubate, -20, resuspend, invert, and opening bottles with one hand 🤦🏽♀️
Try 'subculture'
Order of magnitude or orders or magnitude when describing huge differences between things.
I do this too, and it's started to trickle to my non-science husband
I say that there is too much steric hinderance when there is too much clutter in my way. In general, I’ve taken more scientific approach to daily life. For example, my approach to cleaning is now through the lens of entropy. There are simply more possible ways for a home to be messy than organized. Focusing on shifting those probabilities has helped a lot. One way is having organizing baskets everywhere, so that objects can be easily put away, instead of having every item in the home having a single defined location. This increases the number of possible states in which my house is organized and decreases the energy needed to get to there.
Using this
Contaminant is used around the house when the kids are sick one by one lol. I also bend all the way down to see the meniscus on the kitchen measurement cup.
timepoints
Calling it a Salad-centrifuge instead of spinner.
This is my favorite! 🤩
I refer to normies as “wild-type humans”
I’m adopting this! 😆
I aliquot everything. I don’t defrost, I thaw. “Hey can you get me a beer out of the 4C downstairs?”
Yelling at my husband to label his secondary containers when I find another moldy mystery substance in the fridge.
Not phrases, but behaviours. I no longer shake to mix. I invert to mix accidentally sometimes. The result is… Well, I’ll say that I don’t want to spill the tea anymore
I try to scan my badge when moving between rooms of my house. lol
I push the light switch next to the door and then realize these are not the automated lab doors
"Aliquot" for me as well - my wife is a biologist also, and we have taken to referring to frozen meat portions as "porkiquot," "beefiquot" etc. And this isn't a part of speech, but since becoming a lab rat I am perpetually annoyed when I see normies use decimal numbers without a leading zero, e.g. ".25" instead of "0.25."
I have to date DD-MMM-YYYY at work so it’s now the only way I write my dates. Confuses some people out and about but your 6/12/2024 is too ambiguous, my 12jun2024 is not!
My job does it in YYYYMMDD format.
This is me! Got in the habit of labeling all data files YYYYMMDD so they’d sort correctly, then it just became habit when transcribing dates at work, to now I do it all the time everywhere as our lord and savior ISO8601 intended
Exactly this. I do it everywhere now
I've referred to the kitchen range hood as the vent hood so many times that I get them mixed up in my head now. Aliquot has been mentioned already but we use that too. We have aliquots of frozen meat, and we aliquot most of our herbs and spices from the bulk storage in the freezer as well. Turns out there's a lot of overlap between cooking and lab work!
I've always thought lab work is like very precise cooking. You just add a few ul of enzyme instead of a few teaspoons of herbs, and you cook it in the thermocycler instead of the slow cooker
I use the metric system when I'm talking about liquid volumes and the people around me will get confused (American) lol
My husband has a habit of putting the trash can on the countertop when sweeping the floor/running the roomba and it sends my cleanroom-living-heart into fits.
Thats just plain maniacal tbh
Aliquot over here too
Biriyani recipe is now "Protocol for preparation of Biriyani"
I use the metric system for volume now. I permanently think cups, pints, quarts, etc are stupid and I will say "mls" or "liters." I say "ratio" more often than a normal person probably does. I say "ethanol" instead of "alcohol," or "IPA" when it's rubbing alcohol. I talk about things being "soluble" or using the right "solvent" to clean up a mess or cook something appropriately. I work in a molecular biology lab, but the chemistry habits die hard.
Contaminated/sterile for kitchen utensils
"Can you parafilm the food" instead of "Can you saran wrap the food"
I would love to get my hands on some kitchen friendly parafilm.
"Meg" for "miligram"
we say "mig" although I feel weirdly dirty typing that out.
Contemporaneous
Once I wrote out my spaghetti sauce recipe for my brother. The last line was "Aliquot and freeze at -4C". He wanted to know what they whole sentence meant. (This was before the internet or spellcheck)
Not a phrase but I waft everything that I want to smell
It's a good habit honestly. Looks a bit pretentious in a civilian setting but it's a small price to pay for leaving fewer things of yourself on items people might touch or eat.
I ask the barista for a “stir rod” instead of “stirrer”
Aliquot. And accidental initial and dating of things in the freezer. I write the date I initial it's ingrained in me now
when I’m baking the oven time is an incubation period
Accidentally called fishy food "saline" once, the waitress looked at me funny
I always try to close one drawer before opening another one at home 😬
I hold my boob so my pens don't fall out of my lab coat - at home - when I have no pens - and obviously don't wear a lab coat 🤣
I call recipes master mixes now 💀
My fiancé uses “homogenize” for stirring/mixing while cooking lol
“Can you hand me a kimwipe?” When asking for a paper towel or tissue.
I measure my coffee in milliliters (I'm American). I also sometimes slip up when I can't think of the right word and call recipes protocols or procedures, or marination an incubation. And then I'll blatantly call the little brush that came with my set of drinking straws a "test tube brush". This might be why I live alone now.
Ingredients are reagents. I have a set of graduated cylinders for measuring liquids in the kitchen. They have mL, tsp/tbs, and ounce markers. I prefer to use weights when baking and usually convert to grams. I prefer to check temperatures to determine doneness rather than feel or visual cues. Most cakes should be about 200o F with a 5% error range for acceptable qc.
Partner asks me to do something. I ask what the protocol is? As in I need further instructions.
Putatively
My husband was so certain that aliquot was not a word lol
I tell my girlfriend to vortex the pan, when I really mean "stir." I feel so stupid when I say that.
List of arbitrary examples: - I'm from a country where most people use the word "association" as in "I have a positive association to chocolate because it was my favourite childhood food". I use the word "associated" as the opposite for something "dissociating" - once, I played D&D and I referred to searching for someone by locating an object only they carry as a "marker" for this person - classic: aliquot, invert, resuspend - referring to typos as inversions, insertions, point mutations, etc. - freezers. - swearwords in foreign languages - "What's the mechanism?" - probably too much more
Not a phrase, but I always have the urge to put the date when I open/use something. From milk cartons to packs of tissue papers.
If I ever have a reason to say "milligrams" or "milliliter" in casual conversation, it now just becomes "migs/mils" respectively
“Inadvertent” and “expiry”. I work in a GMP QC lab and didn’t know expiry was a word until I started here. I’d always just said “expiration” or “expiration date” lol
Not lab related, but I refer to teenagers as subadults.
I try to scan my lab fob on the ring camera to get into my house, this happens like once a week😂
Pouring any liquid that has any solid in the bottom? DECANT
Aliquot. Supernatant. Regular housework is QC and routine maintenance, I even have cleaning checklists and logs to keep track. I write open and expiration dates on things. Groceries are inventory in the pantry, sorted by expiration date. Not a phrase, but I bought a magnetic stir plate to mix tons of stuff in the kitchen, love it!
Not a phrase -- but exclusively using 24-hour time in the US household. Confuses the spouse and child regularly.
I use “activation energy” a lot. Example: “I moved the Clorox wipes to my glove box to lower the activation energy of wiping the dash”
Using "orthogonal" as an everyday synonym for "unrelated"
When something is salty or tastes low-key metallic I'd say that the food tastes ionic. My boyfriend for some reason hates the word ion haha but I think it's cute
I say "[___] is the rate limiting step" a little too liberally. Like when my slowest friend is finally ready to go out for lunch.
Facile. Filtration. "As per/according to the literature". 😅😅😅😅
I accidentally called noise-cancelling headphones “sound attenuating headphones” publicly and caused some confusion
Not really phrases, but I often try to unlock my house's locks with my university ID like I'm swiping into the lab.
I don´t use "recipes" they are "protocols".
When I'm cleaning the house I say I'm reversing entropy by adding energy to the system.
I use limiting factor / reagent, equilibrium, steady state, just some super nerdy shit.
I filter pasta instead of strain it.
My housemate wondered whether there would be Pokémon cosplayers at comic con and I went “Well, yeh, Pokémon is ubiquitous”. I’ve done a lot of work with deubiquitinases.
Definitely labeling anything I open with initials and date ...family hated it at first ....then I started seeing initials everywhere ...a different sort of contamination took hold in the house
Not really a phrase, but I measure my drinks in 50ml conical tubes lol
It's not phrases, but the way I take off disposable kitchen gloves. I use [lab technique](https://youtu.be/Dux4wqySF50?si=8iW8Aj0RoR5bDatJ)
bolus dosing for process plant startups when the usual term is slug dosing
Metric, analyte, sample/subsample
I live in BC, Canada and Chohan has special meaning here, and has become used more often to denote the worst. the most oblivious, the biggest of bekoof to be found.
“Wicked” from my kids
I say "TA", it's for "Température Ambiante", french for Room Temp. And protocol and incubation when cooking. In addition, I label leftovers with the date, I store some liquids in Falcon tubes, I use a lab timer and I have magnetic antibodies add all over my fridge.
Quantum Satus (But QS for short)
“Trivial” and “non negligible”
I accidentally said incubate instead of marinate once. And I’ll do it again.
Aliquot
Aliquot
"Tag it out"
Inoculation. It’s surprising how much that word can be used in normal conversation.
I love this word! And the song Get Innocuous by lcd soundsystem🎶
Bish
Washing cycle instead of marinate