A Treatise on Cake

Cake: a multitudinous class of comestibles that carries significant weight here at Risø. Success in this national laboratory is measured by credible publications, healthy research grants, favorable press releases, and cake.

Cake is scheduled, often days or a even a week in advance. Everyone syncs their Outlook calendars, Gmail calendars, notifiers, and Entourage agendas with cake. E-mails are sent. Phone calls are made. Planners are marked. Kitchens are busy! Cake is good.

In snynonymity with 'party' or 'informal meeting,' a cake will be "thrown" for several reasons (that I know of so far). The obvious birthday cakes, wedding announcements, and anniversaries (of employment). Successful experiments, tests, arrival of new colleagues and equipment alike, and the 'christening' of lab stations. This last category was the reason for today's cake, given for the official naming of test rig 32 and declaration that it is ready for operation (meaning mostly debugged). It's new name is "Lichen" (after the plant), given by Chris, the American PhD student from Columbia University whom I am working closely with in my tenure here. He said he chose the name because all the other rigs and machines in the lab are either named after Norse deities or Earthly bodies of water, except for one, called Flower. He reasoned that 'flora' needed more representation.

The cake was good, a confection resembling chocolate brownies (after squaring it in its rectangular pan) with orange-flavored frosting and two slices of clementine cuties per piece. There was also a side dish of coconut balls layered with chocolate and sugar. Delicious!

Cake has the added feature of sparking technical discussions amongst us nerds, geeks, and engineers.* Today's topics included a thorough discussion of using gadolinium-doped ceria to absorb unwanted silica from the working atmosphere of a solid oxide fuel cell and solid oxide electrolysis cell test chamber, leak testing on "Lichen," the explosive tendencies of a custom-designed glycine-nitrate wet chemistry powder synthesis process, and the precise workings of an isostatic press machine in the context of fabricating dense ceramic electrodes from powders. One of the older researchers present, a Greek named Nikos, took us on a tangent about how he could float his ceramic powder down to the bottom of a trench in the Aegaen Sea on a nylon string and isostatically press it that way. Being nerds, geeks, and engineers,* we of course discussed (and joked) about the specifics of this pragmatically ludicrous suggestion.

Cake is good.


*redundant, but I included it for completeness' sake.