Liberal Arts Chemistry

Rioting in the Ivory Tower

2012-01-25T05:47:00.000-08:00

I have been accused of the heinous social crime of always being the smartest person in the room (or at least trying to prove it in subtle and not so subtle ways). In the 1980's I was a NATO exchange scholar with a graduate student in Durham University (lovely little city near Newcastle, huge cathedral and a prison).

During my time there a nationwide coal miners strike occurred. In the fiery social crucible of the desperation that was Thatcher's England a scholar in the sociology department at Durham U. published a study that showed that the coal miners that moved to where the coal mines were profitable were in fact many IQ points higher than the miners that insisted on not moving and working coal pits that were economically unfeasible. Durham county was a county with old unfeasible coal mines that were now filled with angry miners with below average intelligence. This was not a good time to publish this study. I can remember looking out the chemistry department window and seeing mobs of miners wandering the campus ostensibly with the intent of dragging him out of his ivory tower and introducing him to some learning from the School of Hard Knocks.

Thus I read with some amusement an article today that assesses the intelligence of the inhabitants of the various silos in the Ivory Tower. As anyone who has read the educational literature in the past 20 years knows intelligence cannot be reduced to a simple number but must respect the multifaceted character of multiple intelligences. What it does basically is not identify the intelligent but it really, really does expose to ridicule the less intelligent disciplines. Really. Go have a look, it statistically shores up all the stereotypes and suppositions that we have about the people we work with.

In my opinion Chemistry comes out of this looking pretty good. The authors make the claim that History ranks high because many historians were in fact interested in science before they saw the light of the humanities and therefore history is an anomaly among the humanities. It made me laugh.

And this is their crucial graphic (go to the article to see it in all its statistical glory).

This is the link to the article (LINK).

This whole issue make me think of the famous XKCD cartoon:

Back to an Old Theme: Periodic Table Abuse

2012-01-23T05:10:00.000-08:00

Given previous posts here and here on related topics I stumbled across this interesting graphic in a Weird Universe post today.

Now, this kind of treatment of the periodic table is not new but there has been some real thought put into maintaining group and periodic integrity so I would surmise that someone behind this graphic knows some chemistry. In any event I see the legend information box contains an interesting mix of philosophy and "meat chemistry".

No Longer Funny

2012-01-17T05:42:00.000-08:00

Cartoon today repeats the comedic stereotype of the science / chemist as explosion prone and disconnected from reality (LINK). The light of recent events and anniversaries for us in the chemical community these stereotypes are no longer funny, if they ever were.

I wonder sometimes about society and its need to create a risible stereotype of scientists so that we can be mocked, of course the other stereotype is the evil mad scientist so I guess bumbling clown is a step up. On the other hand if you will excuse the expression, I see the dude is wearing gloves, if not safety glasses.

To be fair to this cartoonist, Speedbump has a reasonably informed view of scientists and it shows up now and again.

Home Labs: Responsible Curiousity

2011-12-17T16:46:00.001-08:00

I doubt anyone still has this blog on their readers but I haven't heard much about this story (LINK via Boing Boing). I must say that the guy seemed to have a well organized home laboratory. What he was doing with it seems to be anyone's guess. The picture above is from the police file.

The chemicals that make the article include:
potassium permanganate
potassium nitrate
ammonium nitrate
iron oxide
zinc oxide
stearine
copper sulfate
urea
hydrogen peroxide
aluminum powder
dextrin
sulfamic acid
hexachloroethane
charcoal
potassium silicate
sodium bicarbonate
wax shavings
PVC shavings
hexamine
acetone
methyl hydrate
hydrochloric acid

"In his furnace room, he had an electrochemical setup where he seemed to be turning potassium chloride into potassium chlorate"
The only reason that I have emerged a bit from my hole is that this is an issue for me. A former student of mine became a popular local science show leader and over the years developed a home lab of alarming and surprising dimensions. All was well until he died suddenly in a motorcycle accident and left his rather non-scientifically inclined wife to deal with his home lab. We are still sorting through the details but suffice it to say that he was a high school teacher when the local schools were closing down science store rooms and a significant portion of chemicals deemed to dangerous for school ended up in his basement.
So, how do we balance the interests of the non-professional amateur scientist with the practical safety issues related to the use and disposal of the products of reactions that can be done with chemicals from the hardware store?

I do not have any quick answers other than a hope that municiple hazardous waste disposal centers are open to well labelled small (and not so small)amounts of chemicals or a young widow is going to lose a significant portion of her life insurance benefits taking care of what her amateur scientist husband left her.

Colour Coded Phosphorus

2011-06-05T12:23:00.000-07:00

I see the element Phosphorus has had the star treatment by being highlighted in a Science blog of the Guardian newspaper (GrrlScientist). Just like a star however it would appear that the image has been airbrushed a bit.

This is what you see if you go to the website today:

This is what you see if you look in the Google cache for the original post on June 3:

To my eyes the original version seems much more authoritative, interesting and educational.

Manufacturing Peak Silver

2011-06-05T11:27:00.000-07:00

For a number of completely sentimental reasons I carry a 1961 Canadian silver dollar attached to my key chain. I have had it for some time and it is smaller than a hubcap but bigger than a walnut and makes for a conspicuous anchor for my keys.

I don't know if anyone other than Th'Gaussling would have noticed recently but the price of silver has jumped dramatically for sometime and is today worth US $35 / oz. Which means that the coin that I carry around has more than $ 20 worth of scrap silver in it. Much more than the $ 5 it was worth as a collection piece.

Interestingly this means that the scrap metal price far exceed the collection value for the coin and it turns out that right now coin collectors all over North America are scrapping their precious coin collections or at least trying to figure out when silver will peak (in my opinion it has already so the dilettantes should cash in their chips now). Silver madness is a complex thing but it has happened before when the Hunt brothers tried to corner the world silver market and silver hit $ 50 / oz. Some coin collectors have observed that the scrapping of silver coins in the 1970s dramatically increased the value of silver coins by increasing their rarity. All I know is that the discovery of the odd piece of silver in pocket change was the foundation of many a small child's coin collection when I grew up and I never see silver in my change now ... ever.

Anyway, I noticed that CoinNews.net has a conversion calculator for silver coins to get people to turn in their coins for the scrap value. The thing that prompted me out of my blogger hole (I am in the middle of organizing a conference and this is a soul saving digression, I could care less if anyone is reading my nearly dead blog, this is a necessary distraction from colleagues that promise big and then disappear) is the graph that accompanies the calculator. This is today's:

Wow, that is a dramatic increase in the value of silver I need to hustle my poke of hoarded silver coins down to the refinery now to get my cash before this silver bubble pops ... but wait a minute there is something odd about the x axis ...
So in a classic example from "How to Lie with Statistics" they have given a non-linear axis to dramatically accentuate the change in the price of silver. What is kind of sad is that this subterfuge is not necessary the change is pretty dramatic but someone decided that it wasn't dramatic enough. Huh. Anyway, I'm a gonna keep my key fob right where it is 'cause at heart I'm just a big old soft romantic. No really I hope everyone melts their coins so that when the dust clear those of us that kept our coins are left with coins that have a higher collection value. Nothing personal, just business.

Anyway, as I freak out over this conference I may be nosing around my old blog just to think about something different. See ya.

If Paperwork = Marking this is Me

2011-04-14T05:44:00.001-07:00

'Tis the marking season here at Liberal Arts U. I purposely went out of my way this semester to make it a "soft landing" for my students with all the majour assignments due two weeks ago. But somehow it just always happens that I have a pile of orphan / late lab reports, term papers and lab portfolios to mark, each one pretty much squeezed out of some orifice of my students with no time on the clock and therefore each one looks, reads and smells like a first draft. When they are marked and returned I can look forward to the line of students at my door all with the message "I know my mark in your course sucks because I didn't do any work during the semester *but I care now*(1) ... what can I do to improve my mark?". It would be a great service to me if you could provide me with some completely impolite, unacceptable responses to the question.

(1) *but I care now* is an expression that I have begun to hear from students and I think they are confused by what I mention earlier in the semester where I will say "Show me once that you have mastery of the content of the course and I can/will adjust the values of the tests and exams to reflect that you understood the course material". Somehow they are translating that as "Show me once that you care". Meh, back to marking.

This made me laugh and remember when they renamed a number of fish here on the East Coast because city people wouldn't eat Cusk, Pout and Suckerfish. They also renamed rapeseed to canola for the same reason.

Periodic table of Fictional Materials

2011-04-13T11:42:00.000-07:00

This is very clever and related to a previous post. Alexandra de Groot has created an interactive periodic table of fictional materials grouped by the medium in which the material is reported. I see Administratium made the list of joke elements but the old jokes about the elements Woman (Wo) and Man (Mn) don't seem to be in the table. I am also pretty sure however that Unobtanium (Element # 71 Unb) is mentioned as the ore that drives the mining operation in "Avatar" as well. In any event, this is an epic amount of work and a cool online resource.

Law of Diminishing Expectations

2011-04-04T04:33:00.001-07:00

This is an interesting article (it is currently behind a paywall but will come out in a week or so). There seems to be a sub-text here that a generation ago a number of PhD grads had to "settle" for a lower tier university just to have a teaching job. It would appear that those that made such a deep sacrifice of hopes and expectations discovered the joys of teaching undergraduates and the bitterness of failure has been washed clean by the chamomile bath of mediocrity (mediocrity = re-definition of success). I doubt that the PUIs are entirely populated by faculty that dropped off the conveyor belt with newly minted PhDs and hopes to teach undergraduates. On the other hand I do know that many of us in our graduate work and post-docs looked at the research intensive life and said "You know what ... I'd rather spend my life (and in reality the same amount of time and commitment to work) helping people face to face then spending day after day in frantic scramble to stay current, submit and maintain grants and publish largely derivative work." I have to admit that I am unaware of any decent study that looks at the expectation and intentions of faculty in chemistry PUIs. It would be worth a look.

The Action Elements Periodic Table

2011-04-03T15:36:00.000-07:00

I don't know about you but when I have a mountain of marking to do I often irrationally find trivial things to focus on that I would normally ignore. I was taking a break one night and looked at the family DVD selection ("... hmmm Transformers ... nah, I don't think I want to watch that") and then flipped through the hundreds of channels up in the numbers that I usually ignore ("... Oh, Transformers that looks good."). So I was watching the movie and noticed that the cable channel (Rogers Communcation, The Action Network) is using icons of chemistry to sell their programming.

From Apr 3, 2011

You can see one icon on the left where they use the icon of the periodic table to organize the elements of action movies. What is facscinating is the care that someone on their design team used to organise the elements and use them consistently in their advertizing ...

Each element has a symbol and an atomic number that correspends to the attached table.

Their elements can only be partically sorted out from the small bit that I saw during one movie. The symbols are someone straightforward but other are more cryptic (Bz = Testosterone?).I could not find a systematic treatment on their webpage and I oddly haven't seen anyone comment online on this odd use of our icons. This is their element list as far as I can determine:

Element/ Symbol/ Name
#
1/
2/ Ka
3/ Ex
4/ Vi/ Violentium
5/ Hk/ Hunkium
6/ B/
7/ Bu/
8/ N/ Ninjane
9/ Sx/ Sexcetylene
10/ V/
11/ Hr/
12/ Cc/
13/ Wa/
14/ In/ Infernium
15/ Ad/
16/ Ht/
17/ So/
18/ G/
19/ Te/
20/ J/
21/ H/
22/ D2/
23/ Ff/
24/ Cr/ Chromium
25/ Ev/
26/ Sn/ Sniperite
27/ P/ Punchium
28/ K/ Kickium
29/ Bm/ Bombtane
30/ D
31/ Rr/ Rocktane
32/ C/ Corpse
33/ R
34/ S*/ Swearite
35/ F
36/ Ro/ Robotane
37/ M/ Monsterane
38/ Hg/ Hangrenadium
39/ Jp
40/ E
41/ Nk/ Nudium
42/ Zb
43/ Fa
44/ Je
45/ Wp/ Warpium
46/ Lz
47/ Ai/ Air
48/ Bz/ Testosterone
49/ Bb/ Bruise
50/ O
51/ I/ Insultane

This was not what I should have done with my last hour. Oh well ... Back to marking.

So What Are You Going to Do When You Graduate?

2011-03-22T19:26:00.000-07:00

This article was pointed out to me and it seemed to see a bigger picture than some recent thoughts about higher education. I found this statement profound in some way:

"Research at one American university found that those who finish are no cleverer than those who do not."

This would suggest that the academic thermodynamics are endoknowic. There is a work term but no change in knowledge suggesting that the system (the student) can only get hotter with the process. I suspected that was true for some students at the bachelors level but was surprized that it extended to the PhD.

What I found weird is that this was written in The Economist ... go figure.

Term Paper / Formal Reports ... 'Tis the Season

2011-03-09T06:15:00.000-08:00

In my lab courses the formal reports typically include a review of the literature in the introduction and an expectation that the results and discussion will include a contextual analysis based on either the selected literature in the "Suggested reading" or the results of their own literature searches. In the humanities courses that I teach I have given up trying to teach senior students how to write without plagiarizing internet sources so I have them do "naked essays" where I frogmarch them into a room with computers that have been disconnected from the internet, give them annotated bibliographies that they have prepared beforehand and tell them to write their terms papers in the next three hours. High stress, but I get essays that I know are the students own work.

That said, this link popped up on my reader today and I quite like it. I would quote from it but for some ironic reason I cannot lift the text out of the webpage ...

That brings up the annual problem of scientific quotes and referencing. For the most part, in my sub-discipline actual quotes are kinda rare. The expectation is that the writer will paraphrase the source and reference it to a general source citation listed as an endnote. It is assumed that the reader, if motivated, will read the source and find the relevant section themselves without specific guidance. The humanities students, however are forced the specifically cite each quote as page footnotes that really clutter up the page.

In any event, I liked the cut of this articles jib, I found it timely in this semester pause before the onslaught of papers.

Do Not Try This At Home

2011-03-06T10:46:00.000-08:00

I read this article in Time today. Chemistry is replete with accounts of chemists that used themselves as the first test subject for the properties of the compounds that they isolated. I was just at a lecture by a natural products chemist that worked with a pillar of drug discovery who tested which tree frogs to examine by licking them (shades of a famous Simpsons episode).

That said, I think if you asked synthetic chemists about it most would admit, that at least inadvertently, they had ingested a number of unknown compounds. In my case there was a whole class of heterocyclic compounds with a distinctive odour (my wife called it "that wet dog smell"). My group and I made an significant number of new derivatives and truth be told many of them had a significant volatility. High enough in fact that we must have breathed in a significant compound load by inhalation. We all admitted at a group barbeque that after a week or so of working on these heterocycles that both our urine and stool carried the distinctive odour. I reassured my group by telling them that this was proof that the compounds were passing through us unchanged. Unchallenged, as all supervisor assertions must be.

I doubt I am alone but I have at least anectdotally heard from other chemists more concerns about breathing solvent fumes than compound inhalation. The day is coming when we will have to wear full Hazmat suits to add vinegar to baking soda or to even make molecular models of caffeine. All it will take is one lawsuit.

We are at the Semester Transition State

2011-03-01T04:59:00.000-08:00

It has been a long hard winter here at Liberal Arts U. We have over a meter and a half of snow standing in the fields and the piles are as high as they have ever been. We ended February yesterday with 20 cm of new snow. Our problem is that we have not had warmer periods during the winter to melt away the older snow. Under the snow we have there still remains the snows of November and man has it accumulated. This is the view out the lab window.

I have had a weak class that I have had to carry through the Intro Chem Mountains. truth be told they have been dropping. This generation of students will not stay and fail, they drop once they see their learning deficit.

That said this little bit of poetry came to me in the middle of tutorial last week ...

Just gonna stand here and watch you learn
That's alright, 'cause I want your mind to turn
Just gonna stand here and see you try
That's alright, 'cause one day you'll get it right
One day you'll get it right.

Winter will end, the semester after March break is an academic Nantucket sleigh ride but the end is in sight. We have made it to March and the stream on our property that we study for environmental studies is open. Time to get the snowshoes and probeware out.

Chemistry in Cartoons: Boom

2011-01-28T09:41:00.000-08:00

This is an odd coincidence. Two comics on the same day with a chemistry theme. It so happens that the e-comic "Indexed" is a favorite of mine for pretty much the same reasons I like "Sheldon". It has the added factor of often including Venn diagrams one of my favorite mathematical tools from elementary school (that and geometry sets, I love me some geometry sets, I will buy sets even when I don't need them "for the lab").

In terms of the content of the cartoon, I guess it comes down to the word "dissimilar". There are few elements that spontaneously explode on contact with another element. Even hydrogen and oxygen need to be initiated. While I was a fluorine chemist in my youth and we made our AsF5 by the reaction of As and F2 I can't say that they would have "exploded". I bet elemental Cs would give a bit of a woof if you exposed it to F2 so maybe she has a point.

I only came in contact with elemental Cs when I interviewed for a post-doc with James Dye at Michigan State. He was leading a very well funded research group in the area of alkalides and electrides. I remember a graduate student passing my a vial with 100g of Cs in it and hovering while I chatted with the supervisor as if his life depended on me giving him back the vial. Good times.

Anyway the comic reminds me a favorite quote:

"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction both are transformed." Karl Jung

Chemistry in Cartoons: Hair

2011-01-28T09:10:00.001-08:00

I have to admit that I am a big fan of the e-comic "Sheldon". It is a smart, funny and gentle comic. I see that today's strip has a lab component in it. I could care less about the consumption of kale but I am interested in what the creator of the strip (Dave Kellet) thinks is proper lab attire. I like the lab coat and the proper lab goggles but I see that they are using hairnets.

I have to admit that I really only use hairnets as a threat in my teaching labs. I have the general rule that if hair falls on the shoulders or goes past the line of the eyes when leaning forward then the hair has to be held up and back. Students are told that if they violate this basic safety rule that they will have to wear the "hairnet of shame". It really only has to happen once or twice and everyone gets the idea.

I taught at a university where the undergraduate population had a significant fundamentalist Pentecostal component. The young women would often have long straight hair that would fall to the middle of their backs. We taught the students in groups of 90 and it would be a common sight in the corridor before labs for dozens of young women to be carefully piling and arranging their hair so that it would be safely contained. Watching them was a strangely sensual experience. That said, even our best efforts could not keep the hair out of the experiments and it was common to find hair tens of centimeters long in the sinks, equipment, lab notebooks and products of the students. In fact it was a common thing to find these extraordinarily long hairs in tests and exams as well.

I guess we should have made them wear hairnets but I can honestly say that in the five years that I taught there the idea never came up.

Chemical Stereotypes

2011-01-25T12:25:00.000-08:00

We are just not winning hearts and minds in chemistry. Take a look at the copy for this article in last weekend's Globe and Mail.

"If you were scarred by high-school science class, why not turn what were emblems of chemistry-lab tedium into shows of geek chic"

Oh yeah, 2011 the International Year of Chemistry that will make us more popular with the general public. Where is our discipline's Einstein, Goodall or Feynman?

Testify

2011-01-25T05:48:00.000-08:00

I do not know if anyone is still listening, things here at Liberal Arts U have been "challenging" and blogging is the first to go over the side when the balloon is sinking.

In any event, this needs to be read and promoted by any and all scientists that teach in liberal arts universities. Rarely have I read something so true from a university president.

“The most terrifying problem in American university education is the profound lack of scientific literacy for the people we give diplomas to who are not scientists or engineers. The hidden Achilles’ heel is that while we’ve found ways to educate scientists in the humanities, the reverse has never really happened. Everybody knows this, but nobody wants to do anything about it.” Leon Botstein, President, Bard College

Go to this Link for details.

A Graphic Essay on Professor - Student Relations

2010-11-28T04:58:00.000-08:00

I know you have all read this on PhD but I still think this graphic essay shows alotof depth and I intend to use it when students attempt to "friend" me on Facebook ...

The Chemical Workers Song

2010-11-27T16:43:00.001-08:00

A local band called "Great Big Sea" has a song about industrial chemistry worker relations. I taught on Newfoundland for five years and sometime I will have to tell you tales of the Long Harbour Phosphorus Plant ... it always makes me think of this song.

[Chorus:]

And its go boys go
They'll time your every breath
And every day in this place your two days near to death
But you go

Well a process man am I and I'm tellin' you no lie
I work and breathe among the fumes that tread across the sky
There's thunder all around me and there's poison in the air
There's a lousy smell that smacks of hell and dust all in me hair

[Chorus]

Well I've worked among the spitters and I breathe the oily smoke
I've shovelled up the gypsum and it neigh 'on makes you choke
I've stood knee deep cyanide, got sick with a caustic burn
Been working rough, I've seen enough, to make your stomach turn

[Chorus]

There's overtime and bonus opportunities galore
The young men like their money and they all come back for more
But soon your knocking on and you look older than you should
For every bob made on the job, you pay with flesh and blood

[Chorus]

Well a process man am I and I'm telling you no lie
I work and breathe among the fumes that tread across the sky
There's thunder all around me and there's poison in the air
There's a lousy smell that smacks of hell and dust all in me hair

[Chorus 2x]

A Little Love for my American Cousins

2010-11-26T08:25:00.000-08:00

I understand that you are all engaged in an economy saving frenzy that will max out all your credit cards so as you tuck into your turkey leftovers consider this seasonal note ...

The Neverending Argument

2010-11-25T11:35:00.000-08:00

We are having a re-evaluation here at Liberal Arts U. about safety apparel. I am reminded of a discussion I had with a British professor who had come to Canada just after the Second World War as part of the large contingent of second tier academics that came to teach the North American boomers. In a comment to me he said (referring to Canadians) “We first had to talk them out of the trees and teach them to wear clothes before we could teach them chemistry”. Lovely sentiment that, Rule Britannia!

Anyway, I cannot convince the Biologists that wearing safety clothing is like wearing a car seatbelt … 99% of the time it is an unnecessary inconvenience and 1% of the time it is the only guarantee that there will be a next generation of Liberal Arts Biologists. And the cavalier way they handle chemicals like acrylamide and ethidium bromide makes me despair. I have persuaded them to wear disposable gloves most of the time (but I think CSI convinced them more than I ever did that someone could look hot, do science and wear gloves).

In any event the current argument is over goggles and I am seriously thinking of making a pragmatic retreat on this one. The uber-safe, clamped to the skin, scuba goggles just will not fly with the Biologists and we have agreed that we will not make the students purchase separate safety gear for the different Science labs so it looks like we are heading towards a lightweight, polycarbonate clear vision safety goggle that does not touch skin around the perimeter.

The convincing argument that the Biologists gave me was that if we went for the safe goggles the students (actual meaning: the Biology professors) would not ever wear them but if we go for the second option there is a good chance that they at least would wear them propped up on their foreheads or dangling on lanyards. Sigh.

This Is Not My Lab

2010-11-02T12:26:00.001-07:00

This is an image from the recent National Geographic (I would link to it but I cannot find the image in the online version of the magazine). It is described as a chemistry lab in a Detroit school that was abandoned to vandals after a fire in the school.

I don't know if Detroit vandals are more polite than the vandals around here but there is far to much intact glassware in the picture. In fact, who walks away from this amount of functional equipment? There are alot of useful items still in useful condition left in this abandoned lab. Give me an hour to clean it up and I could teach most of first year chemistry with chemicals from the grocery store and the equipment that I see.

In any event I found the image striking.

The Well Rounded Chemist

2010-10-30T19:55:00.000-07:00

The movie "Wit" starring Emma Thompson is an extraordinary narrative of the journey that an English professor takes from diagnosis of cancer to her death. It reveals deep insights into both the medical and academic professions. I happen to have seen it again this weekend and was struck by a small scene early in the movie. The portion of note happens at the 3:00 - 4:00 minute mark from this clip ...

What strikes me about this is the idea that a scientist is admired for taking optional advanced humanities courses where you rarely see humanities students in introductory science courses and only if they are filling a science requirement for their degree. You would never expect to see a humanities student in an advanced science course.

Indeed, as an undergraduate in Honours Chemistry, I opted to take an advanced course in Shakespeare simply because I was interested, on top of my required courses. I would argue that the liberal arts ideal is typically fully realized only in Science students that are allowed to explore their interest in non-Science subjects. The sheer fact that humanities students do not have the language of Science means that they cannot simply show up in advanced courses and get anywhere and in this way they typically fail to meet the ideal of a well rounded academic worldview. I have worked with any number of scientists that could speak with deep personal knowledge on their favorite philosopher, musician or artist but have rarely spoken with an academic from the humanities that had anything more than a superficial knowledge of Einstein or Hawking let alone Hoffmann.

For this reason our community will fail to educate the one sector of society that most needs insight into what we do. Unless we seek to find ways of bringing senior undergraduate humanities students into our advanced courses we cannot expect them to understand science policy issues when they enter society, business or politics. I think this is something we have to think about. I mean how many of our universities pay lip service to the humanities science credit by creating science courses for humanities students called "Science and Society"?

We cannot complain that society does not understand us when we have the instrument of that communication in our hands generation after generation and fail to exploit the opportunity.

It's what I am thinking about. The first thing that I think I am going to do it try to start a movement to change the policy in my University that allows humanities students to complete their Science requirement with one course of Intro Stats. I am going to push for it to be a Natural Science and if possible a lab course. Or, maybe I will just sleep on it.

"Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast. " Shakespeare, Macbeth

The Chemistry Version of these Videos Must be Made

2010-10-30T08:46:00.001-07:00

See If We Can get Thomas To Do this on Video

2010-10-11T05:17:00.000-07:00

Saw this, learned something and was reminded of our dropped pestle test to see if our S4N4 was pure enough to use. Of course there are much more impressive and less educational videos of nitroglycerine on Youtube but the Brits always do a good job of this sort of thing. It's a shame TK left the UK.

Cleavage Reactions

2010-09-14T08:34:00.000-07:00

This was a new one for me. I have been teaching for 22 years now and I have a simple, no-fail rule that I have always used for all students coming to the lab... "No exposed skin below the neck except your hands". So this morning a young woman that is in one of my chemistry classes walks up to me and asks "Is this neck line too low for the lab?".

Now, I realise that I am a fat, middle aged authority figure but I am still a functional male and on the face of it I was being asked to look at the bust line of a young woman and assess it. I am somewhat proud of the fact that my eyes did not do a lazy meander around the cleavage of the young woman but I kept my eyes on hers and made up a new rule on the spot (#).

If something falls from above you will it hit clothing or skin?
If it is skin them you need to cover up.

(Just don't ask how something "falls from above" in the chemistry lab)

She smiled and pranced off (it was then that I noticed that she had on knee high leather boots with stiletto heels ... who thinks when they get ready for chemistry lab that stripper boots are appropriate?).

OK, maybe I have gotten so old now that I think that all my students are my daughter and should dress Amish but how far out of line am I? In the name of safety can I require all my students to wear the equivalent of a burqa? Am I turning into a Fundamentalist Chemist or do I need to put the liberal back into liberal arts and sciences?

To be fair I have had significant conversations over the past few years with the guys about exposed butt cleavage ... "If I drop a quarter down there will you play a song?". I have always assumed that the lab coat covered a multitude of sins but only if you button them all the way up and who am I to say what they wear under the lab coat? Anyway, I can only hope for the days in the near future when I can talk about the other kind of cleavage.

(#) In the name of complete disclosure I must admit that the view was very tanned and revealing but I only looked a little bit. What? OK, so how am I *NOT* supposed to notice?

The Summer That Changed Everything

2010-09-02T05:19:00.000-07:00

This will be remembered as the summer that the Universe changed. I mean really this must have been what it was like to live in the first half of the 20th century when all the fundamental laws, constants and particles were being sorted out prompting Kelvin to say, somewhat famously that experimental science would no longer be involved in discovery but changing the numbers in the fourth decimal point of known values (for an entertaining spin on this read Horgan's "End of Science").

Why do I say that? Well, there is this attitude that we have in Science, especially Physical Science that we sort of have all the important stuff nailed down and we tend to communicate that as our first message to our students.

“I started out in chemistry until I discovered that they were obsessed with something they called “The Right Answer” so I switched to psychology where you basically write whatever you want, and chances are you get a B.”
Jon Stewart "The Daily Show".

Then a summer like this one comes along. Earlier this summer they discovered that our values for the size of the proton were wrong ... by more than five deviations. What? How is that even possible? And this a fundamental value that is one of the corner stones of physical science. So just what are the differences?

Holy improbable Batman, how could we have balanced our equations with this kind of error?

Now, on the other hand, just yesterday a startling observation was published. We all teach kinetics to first year students and they only lift their faces from their drool puddles when we digress and tell them that nuclear decay is a first order process and you can radio date objects by determining isotopic ratios AND ASSUMING THAT RADIOACTIVE DECAY IS CONSTANT. Yeah, like we couldn't get that wrong could we ... well until someone actually checked at least. It would appear ... well, let's let the professionals say what they mean:

"On Dec 13, 2006, the sun itself provided a crucial clue, when a solar flare sent a stream of particles and radiation toward Earth. Purdue nuclear engineer Jere Jenkins, while measuring the decay rate of manganese-54, a short-lived isotope used in medical diagnostics, noticed that the rate dropped slightly during the flare, a decrease that started about a day and a half before the flare." [link]

"Everyone thought it must be due to experimental mistakes, because we're all brought up to believe that decay rates are constant," Sturrock said. [Peter Sturrock, Stanford professor emeritus of applied physics ][link]

"It doesn't make sense according to conventional ideas," Fischbach said. Jenkins whimsically added, "What we're suggesting is that something that doesn't really interact with anything is changing something that can't be changed." [Ephraim Fischbach, a physics professor at Purdue and Purdue nuclear engineer Jere Jenkins] [link]

So in three months two fundamental laws and a fundamental principle that we teach first year chemistry students has changed dramatically. Makes you think doesn't it? I can hear textbooks being re-written already. But at least we are living in a time of discovery.

Quote that has nothing to do with this post but it made me laugh ... and I needed to laugh.

"It is rare to find learned men who are clean, do not stink and have a sense of humour."
Montesquieu (1689—1755) about Leibniz (1646—1716)

Research Incest - It's a Game the Whole Research Group can Enjoy

2010-08-29T11:25:00.000-07:00

Research ethics, you want to talk about ethics?

It seems that people recently have been concerned about the omnipresent PI and how a supervisor is responsible for things that occur when they have their back turned. The whole “the PI has responsibilities for everything that occurs in their lab” issue got me to thinking about a friend of mine.

My friend was (and is) one of the best set of hands in Main Group synthetic chemistry. He had just started as an independent researcher and spent all of his available funds on two graduate students and a post-doc. Things were going very, very well for about six months. Then, one day in the late fall, my friend walked into the lab to discover his post-doc and one of his graduate students, on the floor, on top of a pile of lab coats recreating the more disturbing parts of “Monsters Ball”.

The post-doc and graduate student were married … just not to each other.

I just hope they used a safety shield.

He called them both in the next day to have a chat about the proper use of lab coats. Suffice it to say within the week he had lost both the post-doc and the grad student, leaving him with a relatively weak Masters student to start his research career. In a lesser person this would have crippled a researcher but not this guy. Did I mention he was the best hands in synthetic Main Group chemistry? What he did was move out of his office and into the lab. He taught his courses, worked at the bench, trained his remaining grad student and wrote papers and grants in the evening. It was quite possibly one of the most heroic efforts I have ever witnessed.

And it worked.

Given the tone of the recent discussion on the role of the PI one has to wonder if my friend had any business addressing the issue at all. There are all kinds of sloppy behaviors leading to all kinds of explosions that can wreck a career.

When we discussed the whole situation at a conference my friend said that he really had no moral objections to what they were doing but he felt that he was not in control of his research group.

So what about it? We have all experienced the “Love Amongst the Beakers Syndrome”. I mean really, long hours, limited socialization and no one really gets your obsession except your chemical family. Reseach incest … is it another PI responsibility?

Of course the mid-life crisis / PI – French post-doc adulterous affair is so common to be banal but that is different aspect of the same phenomenon.

If Hemingway were a Chemist ...

2010-08-27T05:26:00.001-07:00

So, from the shadows of self imposed exile the sleeping chembloggers of the early 2000's awaken and realize that the intertubes are dangerously low on chem research gossip, Nobel prize in Biology speculations and inter vs intra chemistry department politics (with cathartic posts made and then unmade). Even Homebrew has lifted his head from his desk and contributed if only to say "meh".

The chembloggers all seem to recently have had a weird nerdgasm about energetic materials, even the redoubtable Gandalf of the chemblogosphere, Lowe the Grey, greatest of all chembloggersTM, has made mention about a specific researcher.

Friends, I got my first job as a summer research assistant because a graduate student sheared the ends of his fingers off when a 10 mg sample of tellurium azide exploded inside a metal can reaction vessel. They needed "fresh fingers". We changed to large volume, glass reaction vessels so that the lower bursting pressure of glass would fail at lower energies and bagged the X-ray structure of that sucker. We routinely made and worked with gram quantities of pure S4N4 the true "left hand of Satan". To prepare it for chemistry we had to grind crystals of the stuff into a powder (if it wasn't kinda "crackly" it wasn't pure enough).

There is a reason why some reagents and some chemical reactions have not been reported yet. When it comes to some binary and trinary combinations of elements the path to the chemistry textbooks is very ... Darwinian. And let's face it boys and girls, the true measure of success in chemistry is not measured in prizes. True impact is when your research makes them change the content of the second year sub-discipline textbooks. If the teaching community believes that your research has to be mentioned to second year chemistry students then you have made an impact. Anything else just says that you have enough friends to throw a party.

When Thomas Klapotke joined our lab he was making piano stool metal carbonyl complexes in beakers on the benchtop. We taught him how to make and handle energetic materials. In fact, he watched over our shoulders while we did it. He was amazing to work with. He would work a full day in the lab and then put in at least a six hour shift on his own research (which I helped him with from time to time). That way, when he finished his post-doc with us he had three papers under his own name, on his own research, ready to submit. But don't think that he was all work. He arrived in North America and looked at the local cars then decided that he would have his own car shipped from Germany rather than ride was was available here. I remember reading the German on the side of his tires "these winter tires are not recommended for speeds above 180 km/hr."

Now to be fair to our little branch of Main Group Chemistry, the prevailing attitude towards lab accidents had a Hemingway / Nietzsche flair to them. I mean when you are working with explosives and elemental fluorine confidence mixed with fatalism is the only worldview that allows you to slip on your codpiece in the morning and face your supervisor.

Our conferences were always dodgy when it came to first time, face to face meetings. Handshakes were fumbled because of missing fingers (you ever shake the hand of someone missing a thumb?). I remember a conference in Banff where a bunch of Old School Main Group Chemists re-enacted the scene from "Jaws" where they compared scars from chemical explosions. The winner would have to be a chemist from Germany who must have had the skin flayed his arm and the scar tissue went on, and on, and on ...

Therefore it was not astonishing that a few years after he left us Thomas sent us a letter with some enclosed photos. I will let his wry comment close this post.

Back to the Future

2010-08-17T06:19:00.000-07:00

In celebration of the return of ChemBark and Propter Doc I must pop up this tiny offering on my series on chemistry used to sell things. I see Future Shop in Canada is trying to convince people to buy flat screen TVs with images of chemistry.

It is a bit confused, but internally correct. There are two balanced chemical reactions listed one of the reaction of nitric acid with copper and the second appears to be an acid with carbonic acid. There is a dilution calculation and a freezing point depression calculation, a correct statement of the molar mass of hexachloroethane and parts of a larger organic molecule. As far as I can see the individual bits are correct.

Chemistry doesn't need to be cool when it functions iconically as something within the practical world of the general population that is "useful" but also advanced and capable of creating a better future. In reality that is all that advertising really sells ... a better future if you buy what we are selling. Chemistry doesn't need to be understood when it delivers a meta-narrative of progress.

I see that when they needed something to symbolize the quality of the image and technology they did not go to biology (too low and muddy) or physics (too arid and mathematical).

Chemistry sells. Now if we could just get a commemorative posting from HomeBrew we could rock out like it was 2005 all over again.

Gateway Thoughts on Science

2009-05-18T09:53:00.000-07:00

I can remember reading science books when I was in elementary school and thinking that the more science a person knew the more answers that you could give to interesting questions. What I noticed was that it was not the Trivial Pursuit questions that interested me (although I got the biggest pay back from teachers for just knowing stuff that blew them away). The questions that I liked knowing the answers for were things like why clouds are flat on the bottom and why is space black if it is filled with light.

That said it, is the stereotype circus science that seems to always be the "gateway thought" (sort of like marijuana being thought of as the gateway drug (when in my opinion it is alcohol (or caffeine))). It is important however for us in Science to remember that there has to be something that grabs children and makes them re-think becoming a fireman as a career. In chemistry it is the inevitable "Magic Show" (shudder) with faux wizards, bangs and flashes that seem to get that first response. In a horrible way it would be like a model for Christianity where you would use televangelists to do children outreach. In fact, I do a school outreach presentation entitled "Not a Magic Show" where I do the regular stuff but underpinning it all is a grade appropriate explanation for what the students are seeing. I even have a logo.

But still ...

I think XKCD caught a shadow of this idea in their most recent strip (as a disclaimer I will note that XKCD is an "adult" webcomic that explores modern life from a engineering / science perspective and veers sometimes into NSFW).

Click on image to embiggen

I guess what I am trying to say is that sometimes the complete mis-understanding of what Science actually is may be our best way of promoting it to children. But then again that is a model that works for religion, politics and relationships. Does all of life have to be the Dance of the Seven Veils?

The Stupid It Burns

2009-05-15T06:11:00.001-07:00

This image was drawn by Ahren Paulson and picked up by Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy . This image deserves more circulation in the science / chemistry blogosphere and its own acronym ... TSIB (The Stupid It Burns). This would have helped Kyle at The Chem Blog in his discussions on the pseudoscience techno-babble surrounding "organic salt".

Speaking of TSIB I find it ironic that one of the most common sources of TSIB is the advertizing section of Popular Science. As just a quick example we have the good people who have this ad...and they provide this helpful table ... TSIB people, TSIB.

I Can See Clearly Now the Snow Has Gone ...

2009-04-13T07:12:00.000-07:00

The storm largely passed in the night and I was able to swamp my way into Liberal University and this is the view out the Liberal Lab Window this morning. Pretty, but getting pretty old. There is enough heat to the ground and the Sun now that this should all be a passing bad memory within a couple of days.

For me this is the last week of classes. I have been getting frantic emails from the students, especially the marginal ones, asking Me (!) what lab reports they haven't submitted and what the late penalties would be for late work. This is my own fault since my late penalties bottom out at 45% and that means anything submitted late retains some value until the end of semester. And some of them need the marks.

I also have some students that have gotten some quack MD to back date medical excuses for when the students were sick earlier in the semester. This means that I will either have to set the labs that they missed for them this week or come up with an equivalent replacement. Two weeks, one fortnight, 13 sleeps and the madness will be over.

Then I have to get ready for my Science Camp for Homeschooled High School students in early May. Win!

Greetings of the Day

2009-04-12T10:25:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone, we had 30 cm snow last night and have 20 cm more coming today. At least we had a week of warmer weather to cut down on the accumulated snow and ice. The old farmers said that a spring snow was "the poor man's fertilizer". But still, it is hard to celebrate the day when you have to shovel your driveway.

This is what Liberal House looks like today.

Anyway, life goes on so as a shout out to Homebrew I give you the ... ETHER BUNNY!

So now we will know ...

2009-04-05T16:01:00.000-07:00

We are all pretty much aware of the the study relating airplane contrail clouds to global warming and the way that the study was advanced by the clear skies following the 9-11 attacks and the grounding of all aircraft over the continental United States (LINK). It was a dreadful cost to reveal the truth about a link that would not have been revealed in any other way. Of course there are those that dispute the correlation (LINK).

A recent column in the Globe and Mail got me thinking in the same direction (LINK). In the column it was pointed out that the world econopalypse was going to accomplish what no manner of evangelical environmental preaching had failed to do. With the collapse of the world economy the entire world will reduce, re-use and recycle out of necessity. The generation of green house gases linked to industrial activity will also be dramatically reduced.

My question is if we are going to be able to use this dreadful window of opportunity to both measure and test the accuracy of our climate models. I have been looking to see if anyone is thinking this way but am not seeing it. Of course, it all depends on how deep and long this financial crisis lasts but more than any other factor it will cause the world to do exactly what Gore and the environmental catastrophists have been saying we need to do. I can only hope that we will never have this chance again.

Labin Fever

2009-03-30T11:12:00.000-07:00

The temperature refuses to go above 5 oC for weeks, last week it was 10 cm of dry blowing snow that sandblasted your face as you trudged to work into the bracing wind. This week it is 30 cm of wet, bone chilling snow that forms a gelatinous crust over everything.

You look away from the window.

3:35 pm
3:35 pm?
3:35 pm!

You have set-up a long term study in the fumehood and everyday at 3:35 pm the temperature suddenly decreases. What? Why? This winter is suddenly going on too long, far far too long, dangerously long. The voices ... the voices whisper ... "It must be the Biologists". Well of course it's the Biologists. Ever since I joined this circus wagon the Biologists have been my bane, my foil and my friends. It's just, just that they are all so ... predictable. But what would the Biologists do at 3:35 pm to my experiment? It's not like they would wander into the lab and fiddle with my knobs. Would they?

Have to fight the Labin Fever. You know it's not paranoia if everyone REALLY is out to get you. Suddenly the eyes narrow and the knuckles whiten as they tighten on Fisher the temperature probe. The fumehoods ... I share a fumehood fan with the Biology lab and everyday at 3:30 they have a lab ... AND THEY TURN OFF THEIR FUMEHOODs 'CAUSE THEY'RE NOISY!

I give into the Labin Fever. This winter will never end, there is no bottom, there is no side but I do know an orifice in the Biology lab that Fisher will fit into quite nicely, quite nicely indeed.

I just have to wait until 3:35 pm.

Goin' Zombie

2009-03-26T18:55:00.000-07:00

Everybody here is bitter. The students are bitter, the faculty are bitter, the instructors are bitter and the staff are bitter.
Now it is possible that the weather has something to do with it. Two days ago we had more than 10 cm of snow in a storm that closed the schools but not the university. No, we have a large residence population, so our classes can go ahead no matter what the conditions. This was the view out the lab windows ...

So the cruise ship Bitterness is still looking for a harbour. I had to sit in on a meeting with a dysfunctional Biology department late last week where one of the things that needed to be resolved was the stealth Biochemistry prerequisite to almost all the upper level Biology courses. It turns out that the Biology department was founded by two faculty that were confirmed molecular reductionists. So now that we have Biologists that have a more organismal philosophy they want to avoid the heavy lifting of Biochemistry. What was amazing was a) watching the two sides talk past each other for two hours b) the escalating rhetoric and c) the clumsy politics. It was absolutely classic faculty communication "What I said was pure genius so if you don't agree with me then I must repeat what I just said ... but louder". Sometimes I hate being Head.

My History of Science course went zombie on me. The lecture was on the transition between Newtonian Mechanics and the Quantum Universe. About half way through the lecture the class lost all symptoms of interest. Oh, I have drained the joy of learning out of a class before like some kind of academic vampire but this was something different. Usually there is at least one student in all my classes, driven by the monomaniacal pursuit of marks, that will at least feign interest because they know when the class descends to apathy the merely competent student suddenly shines. No, the whole class started looking into the middle distance and became totally unresponsive. I tried to adjust by breaking the class out for a discussion and a it fell flat and they never came back intellectually. This long grinding winter has to end before the center falls.

And then there is the staff. We are in the long straight run towards the end of semester. The staff have got to step up to their A game and it is just not happening. Our Administration, in their wisdom, decided that in the middle of a financial crisis we need to go on a building campaign and have deflected the attention of our development personnel towards an all-encompassing Capital Campaign and we in the faculty have been told that the cornerstone of the campaign is the ability of the campaign staff to say that the faculty were the first to step up with significant donations as evidence that we believe. Oh yes, I had them reach out and touch me last Friday. We will need to raise the first million dollars just to pay for the fund raising campaign. And yet, helpful suggestions from the faculty to enhance efficiency are met with near hostile indifference.

Oh yes, I am ready for this to end. On the research end of things I just got three crystal structures back from the crystallographer but the graduate student that did the initial synthetic work has moved on from his post-doc and disappeared into the chaos that is Mainland China without a forwarding address or contact info. So what do I do? Hold off publication until he surfaces? Proceed to publish only the structures without the synthetic details and with only an acknowledgement of the student's work? If I can't get his signature on the author list I can't publish his work. Oh well, three more weeks of classes ... just three more weeks of classes. If the students can go zombie then so can I.

The Sentimental Scientist

2009-02-02T05:48:00.000-08:00

The geniuses that designed our building optimized teaching and office space but literally designed the building without any storage space. While we have become quite adept at finding and using microstorage "hide in plain sight" spaces it just seems that the labs especially are an avalanche waiting to happen.

So, I have been on one of my periodic purges (no irony intended). And at the bottom and back of a desk drawer we use as a spectrometer table for the teaching IR I found this collection of objects:

What we have here is the high school chemistry text that I used in grade 11 and 12. The safety glasses that I wore through graduate school and the last CNDO/2 program that I ran with punched cards (it was an optimization of the torsion angle in the dithionite dianion).

Sentimental fool that I am I have kept these incidental objects, the flotsam and jetsam of a life in science, for decades for no other reason than the tactile joy and nostalgia they bring to me. They went back into the drawer but really, am I alone in doing this? Should I just grow up and move on? Does anyone else have an irrational scientific memory drawer? What is in it?

Have a good week people, play safe.

Too Much Information

2009-01-30T09:05:00.000-08:00

For reasons that you do not want to fully think about I happen to have recently developed a deep personal understanding of the words "colon" and "colonoscopy". By themselves they are a simply a punctuation mark and a spectrometer for punctuation marks. In the lives of middle aged men though they are the chill words that whisper "You know that whole dignity thing you have been working on since you became a professor? ... it's all over now".

Now, colonoscopy examinations are the cornerstone of preventative medicine for bowel cancer and it seems that women (who seem to be more reconciled the loss of dignity that the medical establishment demands) are just fine with the procedure. There have, however been some pretty spectacular accounts of men who have had colonoscopies in the popular press.

This is Dave Barry's account of a colonoscopy procedure (Danger, do not read this while eating or drinking unless someone familiar with the Heimlich maneuver is present)(LINK)

This is Peter King's account of preparing for a colonoscopy (LINK)

It is the preparation that prompts this posting gentle readers. In the good old days they treated you like a vet would treat a horse and made you slam down a glass of trisodium phosphate to empty the system. Yes, that is the same trisodium phosphate that you can buy by the kilo at the hardware store as TSP to remove wallpaper. It seems that this treatment was particularly effective but rather harsh on the lower bowel and dramatically lowered your electrolytes to a dangerous level if you were ill. So now they have these mixes that they give you. The one I am now familiar with is GoLytely.

Now the good people that make Golytely have a webpage (LINK) that declares that Golytely "Was the first bowel prep not contraindicated for cardiac and renal patients ". So, with that confidence you whip up a four litre batch of this stuff. Now, 4 L of anything is a lot to drink but it tastes as Dave Barry says "like a mixture of goat spit and urinal cleanser, with just a hint of lemon". What you are drinking has to empty the bowel without wrecking your electrolyte levels so the ingredients are interesting (at least they are if you are stuck in the bathroom with nothing to read for six hours).

Polyethylene glycol (LINK) (this is the primary active ingredient)
sodium sulfate (LINK) (this is also known as Glauber's Salt and is also an active ingredient)
Sodium bicarbonate, Sodium chloride and Potassium chloride are all present for electrolyte balance.

In any event I now have an excellent solution assignment for my first year students. What are the molarities, mole fractions and mass percentages of the different electrolytes in the prepared four litre solution of Golytely?

Just remember friends, do not golytely into that good night.

Chemical Optical Illusions

2009-01-26T16:59:00.000-08:00

I was reading through a back issue of Chemical and Engineering News (LINK) and saw this ad. Now, the ad has a number of problems that reveal (a) that Chem. Eng. News does not proofread the ads and (b) the good people at B&C Pharmaceutical R&D Co., Ltd. have much better English language skills than I have Mandarin language skills.

On the other hand I always thought that structural chemistry was a kind of universal language. Which means that I was kinda surprised that this adamantane was drawn with the usual perspective that suggests the three dimensional structure but with an odd selection of bond interruption that causes an chemical optical illusion. If you focus on the top part of the molecule everything is fine but trying to make sense of the lower cyclohexane moiety makes my eyes cross.

Or I could be wrong and they really are making what appears to be Dewar adamantane.

Winter Reflections

2009-01-25T04:36:00.000-08:00

Ten Reasons why having a snowblower is better than having teenage children when the driveway needs to be cleaned.

10. Snowblowers don’t complain.
9. A snowblower will not shovel out your driveway like a prisoner of war and then run off to happily shovel the neighbours driveway.
8. Snowblowers don’t think that shoveling the driveway once means that it doesn’t need to do it again for the whole winter.
7. Waking up a snowblower means changing a lever on the side of the blower to “START”, you ever tried to wake up a teenager?
6. A snowblower will not clean your driveway and then ask for money.
5. A snowblower will not start a Facebook group “Why My Owner Sucks”
4. A snowblower will not wander the neighbourhood dragging back leaf blowers and lawnmowers for you to feed.
3. When you are done with a snowblower you can legally throw it away.
2. If your snowblower breaks there are people out there who can fix your snowblower for $20 an hour.
1. A fixed snowblower stays fixed.

Tainted Blood

2009-01-15T11:42:00.000-08:00

In the early 1980's NATO had a program to encourage scientists to work in the research labs of other NATO countries. All that was necessary was that two research groups agree on a project of "strategic importance" to NATO and agree on who the exchange scholars would be. Our group co-operated with a group in the chemistry department of Durham University (In Durham Town (recently (and disturbingly) in the news). Wouldn't you know we got the grant, I got married and headed for England.

Now, we loved our time in Durham. It seemed every street had a convenience store, a pub and a candy shop. We developed an unhealthy love of Thornton's toffee and prawn flavoured crisps (there were root beer flavoured ones as well). Every night we went for hour long walks that were always rewarding. All in all it was a precious combination of honeymoon, adventure and research. The setting was fantastic and the research done in those four months in fact laid the foundation for the research discoveries that would form my thesis three years later. The last two months however I was on my own and my cooking skills were rudimentary at best.

I can well remember rummaging through the tins of prepared meals. I remember one especially that was labelled "Irish Stew with Meat" the list of possible meats in the tin was a bit more than what you would see in Canada and included horse and rabbit. There were other tins of stew that contained something called "Super rabbit" (whatever that was). I figured "when in Rome" heated it up and ate it like a soldier.

The reason why any of this is at all relevant is because the Canadian Blood Services came to our university today. Here in Canada blood is donated and distributed to anyone that needs it. The system has its problems but all in all it works for us. A few years back my family doctor suggested that I start taking a blood pressure medication as a preventative measure since my blood pressure was "high normal" and heart disease runs in my family. That was fine with me but it meant that I could no longer donate blood. It turns out however that since then they have changed their policy and can use blood products containing my medication.

So I wander on down to the mobile clinic and started the procedure, got interviewed three times (with an obsessive interest in my recent sexual history) filled out three forms with redundant information. I finally was eyeballed and interviewed by a nurse, who noticed that I had checked "yes" when the form asked if I had ever lived in England. Suddenly, there was a flurriment and skufflement and a hushed conference behind a screen and I was informed that the Canadian Blood Services did NOT want MY blood because I may be harbouring bovine spongiform encephalopathy prion. Indeed, they did not seem so keen to even be in the same small space with me any more and I was informed that I should leave by the employees exit.

It all explains so much. The loss of my hair and memory, having to pee in the middle of the night and the fact that when I cross the blueline and make a hard cut to the left I fall down (much to the hilarity of the defense). So it is only a matter of time ... I blame it all on the "Irish Stew with Meat".

The Eyes Have It

2008-12-28T04:11:00.000-08:00

Homebrew tells an important message to all you kids out there on safety and why only European hockey players wear visors (I added that last little bit for the Canadians out there).

He also posted an extreme close-up of his left eye which got me to thinking that eyes tell alot about a person without actually revealing their identity.

So I changed my profile picture to my eye for at least a day or so to see if the other anonymous bloggers jump on the bandwagon. I do not want to wander into naturopathy and other fringe pseudo-sciences but the eyes do tell a story.

Just for the record I wore prescription safety glasses under a full face faceshield for most of my graduate work (I can still see the column of flame shoot out from a reaction tube I was sealing and feel it hit my faceshield and then wrap around my head, I should have kept that faceshield to scare undergraduates). As a lab instructor my students all wear face-fitting safety goggles and I have a rule of no contacts and an instant grade of 0 in the lab if a students takes a phone call or text message. My heart goes out to those students that get contact dermatitis from the goggles but I don't see any really good options beyond prescription glasses like I wore.

Science Sells: Blue Rage Bullet

2008-12-17T12:09:00.000-08:00

One more set of marks to compile and a meeting with the Biology Department and my time is mine to manage. Of course the lab is a tip, I am teaching Biochemistry after the break and my old text is no longer available so I will have to use a new text etc. , etc. etc. By the way, has anyone noticed that the students seem a bit dimmer than usual this year?

Anyway, in the name of work avoidance I have given into something that I have noticed now and then in the last little while. Items that are sold or merchandised using either science itself or the icons of science.

This was highlighted in my mind recently by a second year student who had just won a class assignment contest and I announced that as a prize she could pick out any piece of standard lab glass to have for her own. Now in the past when I have done this students had tended towards beakers (candy dishes, pencil holder) and graduated cylinders (bud vases, window decorations) but this young woman announced that a beaker wasn't "Sciency" and her selection was an Erlenmeyer flask. In my opinion that fits with the idea that an E-flask a higher level icon for science than a beaker. Just by it's shape alone pretty much everyone identifies an E-flask as relating to science.

Now science has been used in the past and currently to sell things. It seems that the cosmetics industry is constantly going through a science / anti-science cycle where one year the hair molecules are scientifically matched to the the amino acid balance in the hair dye and then the next year only ingredients squeezed from some rare root by artesimal means (never touched by a scientist!) are used.

This is what caught my eye recently:Now I have to admit that as symbols and icons go it is indeed possible that there is a much higher level symbol being used to sell this energy drink. But then again isn't that one of the endearing things about the test tube ... just the sheer ... manliness ... of the object?

Anyway, the good people of iSatori who make Blue Rage Hardcore Energize Bullet describe the drink as contained in a "vial" (just like a mad scientist potion). Not only that they say that the container is "virtually unbreakable".
A quick look at the ingredient list tells us that the caffeine dose in the "vial" is 300 mg. Now the amount of caffeine in a cup of commercial drip coffee is about 100 mg so this this pretty much the same caffeine load as two large coffees. The rest of the ingredient list seems relatively unremarkable.
I have to comment on the iSatori website. Could someone please explain to me where the young lady has her right hand and does it have anything to do with the shape of the "virtually unbreakable" container of Blue Rage Hardcore Energize Bullet?

I gotta go finish my marking. Take care people, have a blessed break and I hope the New Year is a good one for you. The economists all say that if you didn't have any investments to lose in the first place and if you keep your job through this period that the financial meltdown should have a pretty low impact on your life. That is my prayer.

Maybe You Have to be American

2008-12-11T07:06:00.000-08:00

I was reading "Canada's National Newspaper" The Globe and Mail today and there was this add encouraging Canadians to join the medical research community in Miami. Now the add sort of stuck out to me because it seemed to look so awkward and uncomfortable. It looks like a bad add you would see in Chemical and Engineering News. I mean they obviously have played the diversity card as far as they can (they do not have anyone with a visible disability but if you have watched any action movies from the past two decades you recognize the hairstyle of the white dude as hiding pure distilled and repressed evil). The fact that they are all standing to a kind of smug attention and the guys are all wearing ties (half Windsor knots I would say all tied by the same wardrobe chick) suggests the sort of fixed stock actor assembly.

That said, I went to their website and found pretty much the symmetry opposite picture and not much more. Does anyone know these people? Would anyone want to work with any of these people? Is it just me or does the white guy seem to be standing separate from the non-whites. What kind of message is this? Is it a "yeah we work with the white dude but there are more of us than him so when that evil haircut takes over we will take him down" message or a "come to Miami and you can work NEAR minorities but not WITH them (if you know what I mean)"

And then there is the badly arranged display of "scientific" equipment. Who advises these people? Why couldn't they have gone to a real lab with real people and photoshopped in the palm trees and water?

On the other hand the Asian guy has a clipboard and I was wondering if it had chemical nonsense on it so I scanned it and an zoomed in. If only I had the magic zoom lens that they have on CSI Miami that renders fine detail from traffic cameras but this is what is on the clipboard. I don't recognize it but it looks legit.

Anyway, I am avoiding marking final exams. I have miles to go before I sleep ...

Legalisms That Knit the Wounds of Liberty

2008-12-08T09:02:00.000-08:00

There are times when being Head of the Science Department in a small university are less fun than other times. The endless meetings are one thing ... why is it that the default debating philosophy of most faculty is "I am so brilliant that if you disagree with me you must not have understood what I said so I will repeat what I just said ... only louder"?

This was a new one for me though. I got a call from Security at 1o:30 last night. It seemed that there were students in the Biology Lab that refused to leave. The end of semester is now on us and the students are confusing necessity with permission again. The Botany professor had told the students in her course that they were required to submit their plant herbariums (is that an aquarium for Herbs?) first thing Monday morning. The students interpreted that as not a call to arms to get the things done before the due date but somehow the professor giving permission for them to be in the lab at any hour they pleased. It turns out that one student signed out the lab key and it simply got passed around from one student to another until finally we ended up with non-Science students in the lab at 10:30 on a weekday evening with the professor of record having no clue that the students were there. The students even got uppity with Security because they were securing the building and the students wanted to be able to continue.

It would appear that our well articulated policy on handing out keys to students was in fact pretty much ignored and they were following more of a honour system in the Biology department. And they wonder why we have thefts in the building.

So now I am crafting a bulletproof, shoot-all-offenders policy that also includes discipline items for faculty. It is hard to do this because as an Honours undergraduate I had complete 24/7 access to the Chemistry Department and it meant a lot to me. To my eyes it is the faculty that are the problem but I am at a loss to teach them anything approaching common sense. Most of them are eat-the-rich-socialist, pot smoking hippies to start with while I like a little structure to my chaos.

Oh well. If I can plow through my mountain of marking, end of semester department meetings and set my exams I might be able to put my hand to a paper I have half written before New Years. That would be nice.

Stretching the Metaphor: Semester Transition State

2008-11-13T08:48:00.000-08:00

I drew this diagram this morning in a conversation about how "tight" all of our students are these days.

If we think of the semester as a reaction with an initial state and a final state then the difference between the states must be the retained knowledge. The progress from the initial state to the final state requires input of existing knowledge, money and time, up to the transition state. I think some would put the time axis so that the transition state is the day of the final exam but I disagree. I think that the transition state is defined as the first moment after you are sure that the last student has dropped the course.

We are now past our official course drop deadline but some students are producing medical notes that they are flashing like some sort of get-out-of-jail-free coupon. So whoever is still on the ride at this point will probably ride this roller coaster to the end. Between now and the end there will be some screaming, some crying and in some cases there will be loss of bodily functions ... and then there are the students ... ba-dum-bum. But in any case we must hope that the money, time and effort results in an endoknowic transition where the student ends up knowing more than what they did initially. I mean this isn't some fool post-modern humanities course where doubt gets you an A. We all know students that were exoknowic in our courses (and you spent a lot of time with them so they could "fail ugly").

So here we are folks at the "high point" of the semester. Gird your loins, sharpen Big Red and buy a box of Kleenex 'cause the next 30 days are going to go fast.

not all tears are an evil

2008-08-31T20:20:00.000-07:00

We all mark time in our own way and as Einstein said time is relative. The reality of my job is that the success of an individual year and the continuation of my university depends on 18 year old girls and the decisions that they make. The demographics of my university (and pretty much all universities in north america) are now heavily skewed towards female students and a program that it not attractive to 18 year old girls is doomed. Thus it is that this is the time of year that we meet the parents. I have over the past week (and will for the next week) met any number of girls and their parents. The parents all want to be reassured that our university is not some corrosive bath of liberal thought and that we will somehow open their daughter's minds but not their lives. And through it all I have been distanced from the delusional parents who somehow think that their children are intellectually and biochemically made from a different cloth than they were at the same age.

Now it was my turn.

My son was fated to attend the university that I taught at (no matter where it was) because my academic career has been marked by decisions based on ideals rather than rational thought. This has meant that we have never been able to save a small fortune for our children's education. But that was OK, if my children attend the university where I teach at then they can live at home and they only have to pay half tuition. Nothing, and I mean nothing beats the 75 cent bowl of cereal for breakfast.

When I explained this to my son he thought about it for a long time and about half way through high school made an important decision. If I could not afford for him to go to a larger university and he refused to go into debt for his education then there was only one solution. He worked very hard for two years and got a full ride academic scholarship (tuition, residence and fees for four years) to a good university. It was like hitting the lottery.

I dropped him off yesterday and all the emotions that I have seen ripple across the faces of parents must have rippled across mine. At the end, he was surrounded by young people that moments before were complete strangers and now could quite possibly become lifelong friends and there was only time for a manly handshake and a long look into his impossibly independent eyes and the tide pulled our boats apart.

It was a long drive to get him there and we listened to selections from my vast collection of "driving" music from my youth all the way. Somehow the music sounded different on the lonely drive home. It was all rather melancholy and it reminded me of the end of Lord of the Rings where Merry and Pippin show up flying Deus ex Machina Airways to accompany Sam back to Hobbiton. Gandalf famously says "Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep;for not all tears are an evil."

I had to get past it so rummaging around under one of the seats I found an old tape of Monty Python skits. It got me home.

LINK

I have work to do and my son has a life to get started but I think I can look into the eyes of those parents with a bit more empathy now.

A Sad Sad Situation

2008-08-28T19:20:00.000-07:00

It seems like the return of the regular teaching semester has renewed people to the point where blogs once laid down have been revived. I am speaking of course of the resurrection of Post Doc who has re-named her revived blog Lecturer Notes. One can only hope that her new position will afford some of the vitriolic public catharsis that made Post Doc a must read in the early days (shades of Professorial Confessions but written by Hemingway not the editors of Teen Heat).

My sabbatical ended horribly with my appointment to Head of the Science Department which means that I get to attend committee meetings until my ears bleed.

Today I spent a lot of time with physical scientists and I realized at one point that I was trying to solve the unit cell of the graph paper shirt being worn by the professor in front of me. I realized that what we need is a decent classification system of graph paper shirts. I pulled a couple of shirts out of my closet and saw this ...

So this shirt is dichromic with a slope of 1/1 and each repeat unit diagonal crosses 5 lines so I came up with D11x5. Leading to these ...

I dunno I think I might be missing something. Any crystallographers out there? And then there is the sad fact that this is but a small subset of the graph paper shirts in my closet. At least with the return of fall I can stop wearing socks with sandals.

Anyway, my ears have stopped bleeding so it must be time to go to a meeting with the Biologists. Light a candle for me.

The Homebrew and Chemistry Bump

2008-07-06T13:32:00.000-07:00

I have neglected this blog for a number of reasons some of which include:

1) a natural disaster involving a river and my family home in which the high point of the ordeal was where my mother had to choose between me or 39 sewage soaked garbage bags of debris from her basement (she chose the garbage bags).

2) having my "secret identity" exposed. I mean really the blogosphere is really an honour based masquerade and with a little effort we could look behind anyone's mask the point is that we wear our masks for personal reasons that should be respected.

3)"interesting but not publishable" results from both the primary and secondary sabbatical projects.

But then I got called out by Homebrew ...

And the hits on my blog jumped from 2 a day to 7 (yes 7, that is a 350 % jump)!

Thanks for the shout out, but along with the "must read" chemistry blogs that have been shutting down recently I just don't see myself blogging much now.

Although I have changed textbooks in all my courses and adopted a whole new set of laboratories for one course that will, no doubt, be cause for much hand wringing and foam flecked invective in the coming semester. I don't know but I do appreciate the mention.

Now I will go gently into the night. Since is seems to be de rigueur to quote Douglas Adams at this point I will go with a quote that is much more useful to synthetic chemists and simply say ...

"Don't Panic"

Big Pharma Take a Hit

2008-04-14T06:09:00.000-07:00

The recent problems of the big pharmaceutical companies have been expertly detailed and dissected in Derek Lowe's blog (LINK). So this cartoon is a bit like kicking a guy when he is down. In addition Big Pharma provides a lot of high salaried jobs to over-educated chemists that are dis-inclined to academe. One should only poke fun at the hand that feeds you so much.

On the other hand the commercials on TV that have more time devoted to the potential side effects than the purported benefits, the sweeping disclaimers on the sides of the boxes and the way that current medicine believes that any problem can be medicated sets this cartoon up really well. I mean, how many of us have a friend or a relative on a drug regime that eventually made them sick because of missed incompatibilities or the masking of true symptoms? They end up in hospital where some genius takes them off all medication ("to establish a baseline") and they get better?

LINK TO CARTOON

PS By the way, how does Forrest Gump know that penguins do or do not have nipples anyway?

On the Road Again

2008-04-09T08:34:00.000-07:00

Spring has finally come to our part of Canada and while the snow still covers most of the ground and the rivers are still frozen we are clearly entering the days of mud and hoses. The Sleek Greyhound of Death has been pulled out of the snow and is now giving good service as I commute back and forth across the province.

For the past few months winter has kept me close to home even though I am on sabbatical the boys have school and I was not conceited enough to completely disrupt their lives for my interest. So I worked away on a couple of publications, a big grant proposal for one of the groups I collaborate with and two (perhaps three) conference presentations. I did not want to spend my sabbatical writing I really wanted to work at the bench in inorganic synthesis but the commute was not possible in the winter (especially after my adventure in off-road driving).

The roads are clear and dry and the visibility is good so the two hour drive goes pretty well. There is a small problem with the local white tail deer population starving to death due to the long winter and they are now congregating near the highways where the shrubs are budding and the foraging is easier. It makes for some very distracted drivers and a number of accidents. I counted seven places this morning where it was clear that a deer had been hit and killed. And I saw this guy.

There is a river that I cross three times on the commute and near the end I can decide to continue on the huge McHighway which is divided and dead fast or the more scenic old river route through farmland. Yesterday I chose the river route and drove by this guy.

It was kinda weird. I could see him from a fair ways off and as I approached him I slowed down and rolled down my window as if I was going to ask directions. He was very aloof and indifferent to my presence so I took his picture. That is the frozen river behind him that keeps him from fishing so I guess he is pretty intent on roadkill as a source of food and since I wasn't roadkill (yet) he could care less about me. Still pretty cool though.

I am now in the process of re-starting the work I left in the fall. It feels good but I can feel the sabbatical running away now. Gotta run.

A Topic of Current Interest

2008-03-06T14:58:00.000-08:00

OK, I am going to get in trouble for this but it has to be said. Environmentalists as a group tend to be self righteous and inconsistent. Take Jabba the Hut ... I mean Al Gore and his Nobel Prize for Environmentalism. It seems that his movement itself does not seek carbon friendly alternatives for transportation and he has not significantly changed his own mansion or lifestyle to be more environmentally friendly. It is always easier to harangue others and make them feel shame then to change ones own behaviour. Perhaps that is why the modern media take delight in pointing out hypocritical inconsistencies in the lives of evangelists. Life is hard in the unblinking light at the top of the pedestal.

So, there is a chemistry blog that I monitor and the young man that maintains the site has been blessed with a child. This prompted a debate on the disposable versus cloth issue.

LINK TO BLOG: Milo's Chemical Musings

Now, thankfully our family has ceased to be blessed with children and ours are graduating high school and getting drivers licences. I would expect that the next time we have to discuss the whole disposable vs cloth debate will be when the children have children or when I become incontinent (probably a close race). I do remember however the horror and pain inflicted on my wife and I when we openly (and one might say gratefully) mostly used disposable diapers. It seemed that people we did not know would go out of their way to let us know the damage that we were inflicting on the environment by using the Devil's Nappies.
OR
Now, there is a whole articulated debate out there about the issue and if one counts the "whole cost" of cloth diapers they seem to not be as benign as originally advertised. And that is one point that bugs me about environmentalists. In any accounting they make of the cost of an item they endorse they assume that time = $ 0. I mean, they invoke an earlier, simpler time when rural folk naturally "reduced-reused-recycled". What they forget is that that ethos was developed between the twin grinding stones of Poverty and Necessity.

You can see them in your churches. They are dying out now, in the same way that our war veterans are passing from society. They are older women who have lived the "simple life". And while it absolutely consumed them the pressure also changed them into the beautiful saints that they are now. (Of course, that also means that they cannot throw out a bread bag or moldy food but that is another point for another day). No these women, and reduce-reuse-recycle always depended on the women, lived in a time when there wasn't money for new anything. They had to make babies, fix meals, clothe the babies and chop wood (more often than not on the same day). This task consumed them and their bent and quite often broken bodies are testament to the harshness of their lives. This was also the reason why a lot of farmers where I grew up buried three wives before they died. Mormon farmers were just parallel not serial husbands, I would like to know if Mormon wives in polygamous marriages lived longer.

My point is that labour is never free. Environmentalists always assume that people will forgo luxury and pleasure AT THEIR OWN COST for the warm glow of environmentalism. That gets me to me second point on inconsistency. Let's take the disposable diaper and assume that Junior soils five diapers a day for a year and half (about 600 days) so that means the "waste load" = 3000 soiled diapers. Each soiled diaper might have the mass of half a kilogram (we had big babies) so that is 1500 kilograms of waste.

Now, let's examine the issue of consistency (and this is where you WILL be offended). I want to address an issue that no man may discuss. As any man has thought (but never said for this is one of those things that cannot be discussed) ... Have any of you ever noticed the similarity between advertisements for diapers and "feminine protection". They use the same words and the same illustrations. When they want to show how absorbent a diaper is they pull out a graduated cylinder with a blue liquid in it and pour it onto the diaper while extolling the "absorbency and dryness" of the item in question. Then the feminine napkin ad comes on and they do the exact same thing. I must confess the idea of a thick blue liquid coming out of my body creeps me out but this wouldn't be the first day that I thanked the good Lord for making me a stand-up pee-er.

Any man that has gotten lost in Shoppers and wandered into "The Valley of the Pads" knows that in fact there is an amazing complexity to "feminine protection" that we can never understand or even contemplate. Then of course there is the napkin versus plug debate that again most men can't think about.
Can we agree that in essence a feminine napkin is a small diaper? Now then let's do some math. If we assume that a woman needs "protection" for 13 weeks a year over 40 years (from age 12 to 52). By the way, does anyone else think that the word "protection" in this context is a bit odd? So anyway, if we have a woman using an average of 3 pads a day for 7 days for 13 weeks a year for 40 years we have a total of 10,920 pads. Math rocks.

Now, I know that pads are smaller than diapers but I would assume that 3000 soiled diapers are at least somewhat in the same ballpark as an environmental problem as 10,920 pads. And ask yourself the garbage man's question: which would you rather stick your hand into ... a used diaper or a used pad? So here we are ... why have the environmentalists not taken on the feminine protection industry in the same way they have the disposable diaper industry? My guess ... PMS.

How do you tell the difference between a woman with PMS and a terrorist?
You can negotiate with a terrorist.
How do you tell the difference between a woman with PMS and a pit bull?
Lipstick.
I got a million of them, I'm here all week ... try the fish.

I mean, imagine you are an environmentalist and you have a choice between making a woman feel guilty about being a lazy mother who uses disposable diapers and telling that same woman just before she needs them that she shouldn't use disposable napkins. Well, no one ever accused the environmentalists of being stupid, just mean and inconsistent. It is always easy to make women guilty and insecure about motherhood ... and it is always heartless.

No, the environmentalist lobby will go a long way towards consistency when they start spreading the news that 13 weeks a year a woman needs to be closeted with cloth napkins and a bucket of hot water. Until that day, let's agree to leave the whole disposable versus cloth diaper debate behind us (if you will forgive a little joke at the end ... oops I did it again there didn't I ... sorry about that shout out for Brittany ... now there is a lady we can all get behind ... ugh that was really bad, maybe I will just settle for Good night and Good luck).

PS. A quote on diapers that I like.

Reason says “Why must I rock the baby, wash its nappies, change its bed, smell its odour, heal its rash? It is better to remain single and live a quiet and carefree life. I will become a priest or a nun and tell my children to do the same.
Christian Faith replies: The father opens his eyes, looks at these lowly, distasteful and despised things and knows that they are adorned with divine approval as with the most precious gold or silver. God with his angels and creatures will smile – not because the nappies are washed, but because they are done in faith.” Martin Luther, Concerning Married Life

A Sabbatical Takes an Unfortunate Turn

2008-02-13T07:26:00.000-08:00

So it is winter in Canada. The cold hands wrap around your house and the restless fingers of cold probe to find gaps in the thermal walls of your home and psyche. In the old days, it was a time for "forting up". A time for reflection and repair. But now? Now we defy the weather and try to behave as if the weather is an inconvenience but life goes on 24/7.

So it snows again and again and I dig out the car again and again.

We have had some kind of snow every week since December and for the past month we have had about three snow storms (where accumulation is more that 15 cm) every two weeks. So the snow has built up to the point where the snow blower can no longer get the snow up over the snow banks. The school kids have missed so many days of school that a somewhat panicked school district had them go to school in a 20 cm snow storm two days ago. As a parent I am somewhat torn on one hand I need them out of the house so I can think and on the other hand I do not want them lost in a blizzard walking to school.

So, I make what accommodations I can for the weather but my sabbatical is slipping away so just like before I clean off the old Kia Rio and head out. To make a long story short, there was slush on the road, the Rio has a very light back end (unlike mine) and when the back end came loose in the slush I focused on getting the car slowed down and in control. By the time I started feeling good about control the car reached its "tipping point" and very slowly slid sideways down into the ditch.

There is a shocking disjoint when one finds yourself sitting in your car but with the gravitational orientation frame orthogonal to the visual orientation frame.

It would appear that my travelling days are over until spring. I guess it is time for some of that good old "rest and reflection".

Dealing with Limitations

2008-01-22T20:11:00.000-08:00

It has not been a particularly productive month. At the beginning of December I was working in the drybox preparing samples when I got a call on my cell. It was not good news. A close family member had an accident at work and within a couple of weeks he succumbed to his injuries and our shocked family was trying to cope with the aftermath. That was coupled to an astounding series of winter storms that left us housebound.
What that also meant was that at a very inopportune moment in the research cycle I was forced to walk away from the bench. Christmas, as somber a Christmas as I remember, came into the mix and suddenly it was a wintry January. It wasn't that it was impossible to do research as much as it was just the wrong time to have to leave the bench work. I had an agreement with my family that in the heavy winter months my commuting to the two research universities would be kept to a minimum and only on days where the roads and the weather were clear.So, with the work incomplete, I started the writing process by organizing and reading the pile of literature related to the research.

But writing (at least the way I do it) cannot be done in a vacuum. I need some back and forth discussion with other chemists, so to take part in the research group discussions I had to dig out the Silver Bullet and head out in the early morning.
When I get to the research university I first have to check on my neglected reactions and update my observations but my limited time on site means that all I can do is watch. This reaction has gone from a corn-straw yellow to a clear cherry red for no good reason. I wish I knew what was going on in there.
Then we have discussions and debates in my temporary office (borrowed for the year from an emeritus professor who had research contacts with an Italian chemistry group, thus the prints over the chalkboard).
Head stuffed with ideas and the light declining I turn the car towards home and the rising Moon for the two hour trip back. Back to the literature and trying to write a paper on incomplete research so that when we do get the bench work done the paper will be ready to go. Not the best way to do things but the way things have turned out. Four hours of driving for seven hours on site and a chunk of that spent in the library reading the industrial chemistry literature that almost seems like it is written in a chemical language I don't know. It is as if they have their own non-systematic name for everything. Ugh.It is always good to get home. I am happy to have the freedom to focus on research during this sabbatical period but as the half-way point slips by I feel that I am way behind and I need to start working harder and smarter. This must be what students feel like.

Everyone Gotta See This

2007-12-23T04:33:00.000-08:00

Truth, all truth.

http://www.pbs.org/kcet/wiredscience/video/82-dangerous_science.html

This is my story as well. If this were a religious evangelical meeting I would be on my feet yelling "Testify!".

I in fact have my own first edition copy of the "Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments"!

I in fact had my own "lab space" under the basement stairs in my parents house.

TESTIFY!

Research and Ghosts

2007-08-03T04:25:00.000-07:00

So ... it's been a long time. I was pushed into a sabbatical, worked out an agreement with the family and a regional university that has me working in a nearby city, bought a broken down Kia Rio and got it working, developed an association/collaboration with a research group and started cooking up chemicals.

Research at the bench is what it always has been. Sometimes it is a visceral delight as the reagents combine into something new. More often than not the process involves taking pure, expensive starting materials and turning them into sewerage but that's the way love goes. Sometimes it is a grind to get through routine housekeeping necessary to keep a lab working. Sometimes bench research erodes the soul with countless small stumbling blocks that can stop a research program in its tracks. I have known them all in the last month or so.

The car has worked well. The driving has been fine since the trip from home to here is in my opinion a great little drive. The weather has been "tourist weather" (hot and sunny). So I leave the unplanned, garish squat of a community by an unloved river where I live and drive to an urbane and quiet small city with a wide beautiful river where I used to live. Why did I ever leave here?

Ghosts.

The research has gone pretty much as I expected. Slow, and at times frustrating. I was fortunate to stumble into a discovery that will allow me to look at some chemistry relevant to some aspects of battery chemistry. I am currently up to my eyeballs in various forms of oils that refuse to form solids let alone crystals. But it's the colour changes that jazz up my day. I have discovered a chemical reaction between two white compounds that have been known for decades and one of which is an industrial reagent. Not only that, the reaction features the combination of two white crystalline solids with a secret solvent and I get the brightest most interesting colours and colour changes (so far ... Blue, green, yellow (lots of bright yellows), orange and red). If I can determine what the chemical species are that are responsible for the colour changes I may just get into the inorganic textbooks after all. It looks like I will be spending the balance of my sabbatical doing ESR and Raman and hopefully X-ray crystallography. Why did I ever leave here?

Ghosts.

We had a water main break in the the basement of the Chemistry building two days ago. The water filled a room so that it was about a meter deep and the doors into the room could not be opened (genius designer had them all swing INTO the room). Not only that the only access to a shut-off valve was behind a wall in the room filled with water. Needless to say the lower floor (which includes the chemical storeroom) was inundated and they had to turn off the electricity to the whole building. We suddenly discovered that the fumehoods have an important role in making it possible to breathe the air and we all bolted for the nearest exit like a bad Mexican burrito.That meant that yesterday I ended up in the Engineering Library doing some long delayed literature work. After a long day of somewhat fruitful reading I headed out of the library and wandered around looking for a bathroom.

Ghosts.

In a random corner of a random corridor I ran into this picture ...

And this picture had this small detail ...

Kevin was a friend, a good friend. We went to school together, we worked together and we enjoyed each others company. He was bright and devoted to sports. We were both raised in a rural community where feelings were mostly repressed but I knew him as a sensitive and curious brother. We sort of drifted apart in University I went into science and he went into engineering but it was a measure of his ability that in a program where the "four year degree" took everyone five years to complete ... he still finished in four. I remember meeting him in the hallway of the Chemistry building the year he graduated ... we walked by each other and simultaneously turned and realized who the other person was. For fifteen minutes it was like old times ... but time had moved on and Kevin was anxious for work so he had decided to go into the Armed Forces. We talked about wives and babies and then the tide took us apart.

About a year later we heard that Kevin and some other students were down in a hole in British Columbia learning how to wire explosives. One of those "can't-ever-happen" accidents happened and some people died including Kevin. I went to his funeral where a doddering old pastor who didn't know him said some stuff that had no meaning to a young wife and daughter. We all cried at the outright wrongness of his early death. And then our lives moved on.

So here I am in this random corner of a random building crying again. That is why I left this place ... there are too many ghosts that can bubble up from my past and rob the precious moment of the present from me while I remember old wounds, words or loves. I have gotta go home and kiss my family and commit to living in the precious gift of the present. As long as I live, I will carry the memory of that last conversation. It is precious to me and, in reality, symbolized all the friends left behind while I was off chasing electrons. Rest in peace brother ... you are not forgotten.

A link to an appropriate piece of music for my mood.

You want the Chemistry? ... You can't handle the Chemistry!

2007-05-19T18:36:00.000-07:00

OK I guess I need to provide some detail. I was a graduate student in an inorganic fluorine chemistry research group. We were investigating Main Group compounds that had inorganic pi systems created by oxidizing electron rich molecules using Arsenic pentafluoride in liquid sulphur dioxide.

The graduate student ahead of me discovered reaction 1. S4N4 is a contact explosive prepared from one of those classic fire from God reactions that were popular in the late 19th century. So you prepare the explosive and then grind it to a fine powder (grind gently because I was in a lab in England where a small beaker of the stuff spontaneously exploded and split a lab bench from end to end). You put the fine powder and some sulphur in a vessel with lots of sulphur dioxide as solvent and then add lashings of AsF5. About a week of recrystallizations later gets you to SNSAsF6 which contains the dithianotronium cation [SNS]+ (think ONO+).

Now SNS+ is a lot of fun but I discovered rxn 2. It turns out that SNS+ does not react like ONO+. SNS+ is a propargyl-allenyl 1,3-dipole favouring reverse electron demand cycloaddition reactions with pi bonds. Thus the reaction with alkynes gives the derivatives of CAT in high yield.

The hero of this story is the 4,5-bis(trifluoromethyl)-1,3,2-dithiazolium cation. I discovered that the reduction of this cation by sodium dithionite in liquid sulphur dioxide gives the blue gas radical in reasonable yield but the reaction works the best because the products are the radical, insoluble NaAsF6 and the solvent SO2. Laborious fractional distillation of the reaction volatiles give the black liquid referred to in the previous post. And I always wondered why the preparation wasn't repeated more often.

Thanks for the interest in the chemistry.

My Small Contribution to Compounds with Pretty Colours

2007-05-18T18:00:00.000-07:00

It was the summer of 1984. I was in the first year of my graduate work and I was cleaning up a project initiated by a previous graduate student. I had come along at the end of his run and picked up the SNS+ reactions with pi bonds and had started with alkynes. I had prepared a variety of compounds using the SNS+ / alkyne reaction and they had worked well. My supervisor decided that I should go to England to learn how to do cyclic voltametry in liquid sulphur dioxide. That brought me into the sphere of a fragile, dedicated chemist of the collegial old school. It was in Durham that I was trying to do anion exchange reactions to get rid of the fluorinated anions so that the cyclic voltametry would work better (in fact the CV never did "work"). One day, late in the afternoon, I would wash a solution of the cation into a solution of potassium iodide and to my wondering eyes the whole flask filled with a pale blue gas. In my small area I knew all that had come before me and I knew that I had discovered something new. I was seeing something important for the first time and it was important and new not only for me but for my whole discipline. My real research career had begun.

It is still unique in my area of chemistry.

The product of the reaction was a radical, traditionally an unstable, reactive family of compounds with only a fleeting existence. In this case the heterocycle was stabilized by extensive pi delocalization and the carbon atoms were shielded and electronically changed by attachment to electronegative, kinetically stable CF3 groups. This also meant that the melting point of 12 degrees C resulted in a liquid with a significant vapour pressure at room temperature. This resulted in the blue gas.

I remember when I did the melting point. I had laboriously prepared the cation salt and reduced with huge excess of sodium dithionite and then fractionally distilled the volatile products three times to remove solvent and bi-products (which I would discover later to be the result of facile photolysis reactions). Then when I had grams of pure dark green black liquid I froze it and slowly warmed the solid in a Dewar until I reached the melting point. What
I was not ready for was the high volatility of the solid near its melting point and soon I had huge shiny blue-black crystals growing perpendicular from the side of the flask. They were altogether some of the most beautiful things that I had ever seen. I would spend a whole year of my life preparing and characterizing this compound. The last problem to fall was the precipitation of the photolytic impurities using a method I had stumbled across in an early JACS paper written by Speed Marvel in which he noted that he had precipitated polysulphide impurities with a catalytic addition of amine. I found a whisper of triethyl amine did the trick just fine.

And that is my coloured compound story.

Chemistry Labs and Teaching

2007-03-09T06:44:00.000-08:00

It is a truth accepted by everyone that especially in Science principles and concepts taught in lectures are best understood by the student when coupled to a laboratory experience where the student not only has a "hands-on" experience with the experiment but also must grapple with recording and analysing the lab in the context of what was taught in the course. So we believe.

The horrible truth is that for the most part the link between lecture and lab is tenuous at best. In many places the labs are so de-linked from the lectures that the lab are offered as a separate course (although perversely in such institutions the number of credit hours required to graduate is increased for science students to the amount of lab courses). It takes a student with a vast memory and a strong desire to make the link to actually benefit from the lab in the manner which was intended.

And then there are the microlab enthusiasts.

Some time in the 1990's micro scale lab procedures swept the discipline. It was everywhere and the rationales were many. Smaller amounts of reagents meant less risk and the same pedagogical goals were attained. In my opinion the same goals were attained because the intent of the lab experience was lost prior to the change to microscale and its popularity was simply the result of pragmatic lab management and prescient students falling somewhere between mind reading and "Clever Hans". We who love chemistry all remember the astonishment and glee that we knew in our synthetic labs when the procedures "worked" and gave us handfulls of product with crystals that you could kill aliens with. Conversely we also knew the hot acrid taste of crystal envy or the shame of prep-TLC inadequacy. Not possible when you have a mini centrifuge tube and the positive sign of reaction is a decrease in transparency. No, it requires bulk, it requires amounts where static cling from the vessel does not retain more of the product that you can recover.

But, it is almost over and it will be soon. We could see it coming and those of us of a certain age will remember our chemical youth with nostalgia. This story has been making the rounds (first to my eyes by a citation from Derek Lowe of "In the Pipeline" commenting on this link).

In my opinion the liabilities, poor link with pedagogical goals and cost (of teaching, maintaining and disposing) of chemistry labs will bring their demise. There will be a transition period where we will rejig our labs to run on nothing but consumer chemicals and ethanol but that as well will pass because the waste will just cost too much to deal with (because the safety officer will not see how bleach in the lab could be handled like bleach at home). The bell will also begin to toll for university research chemistry labs as well. It may take longer but it will have to happen as environmental concerns and the power of safety officers approaches an absolute level. At least some of us were around for the golden age of teaching chemistry both in learning and teaching.

"Pull out the projector Tommy we are going to watch a video of a chemistry laboratory."

F. A. Cotton RIP and Textbook Selections

2007-02-27T07:58:00.000-08:00

In the academic world there are three seasons. The teaching season is followed by the testing season which is then followed by the textbook season in an eternal hamster wheel of learning. Yeah I know, what about research? Research is not a season but a constant state of mind. Right now, it is textbook season and full colour encyclopedic texts with an average mass of 2.5 kilos are falling on my desk with the steady thump - thump - thump of the artillery rounds from Charlie that haunt my dreamless sleep. The organic texts are the worst. I can understand that general chemistry textbooks have to be generic clones of each other with an almost Bataan Death March one-chapter-a-week broad spectrum coverage of our ever widening discipline. But Organic Chemistry? Is it really necessary to show your typical 18 year old University student 1500 pages of organic chemistry, hike up our elasticized waistbands and proclaim (as if we are some latter day Hemingway) that since we were taught (somewhat indifferently) by I. B. A. Famouschemist that they as well would be best served by eating the whole banquet of organic chemistry as we did? Holy moly, no wonder they bolt for the nearest exit like a bad Mexican meal.

With that in mind I heard with deep regret that F. A. Cotton had passed away this past week. He was prolific, a generous and kind scientist that was not awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry because we were too busy awarding it to biologists. Some 27 years ago F. A. Cotton became Gandalf to my Frodo when the awe inspiring copy of his "Advanced Inorganic Chemistry" landed on my desk as the text for my second year Inorganic Chemistry Course. I was stunned. Not only that, Cotton was not the only required text. We also had to have a copy of Huheey "Inorganic Chemistry". It was felt that Cotton and Wilkinson was "too systematic" and Huheey was too "topical" so that a balanced diet of the two texts was required. To make us feel better it was noted that we would not be required to purchase any more texts for Inorganic Chemistry until we graduated after we had self sacrificially gotten through Moria, crossed the river, climbed the mountain, slain the monster and destroyed the ring (all metaphorically of course). I have to admit that having been through that system, my internal compasses all point me in that direction as well. I would love to choose completist and exhaustive texts for my students that would work for many courses. I remember, however, that I am teaching the average student, not the geniuses and the deadheads (they have their own fates independent of what I do). I select my texts for the student that needs the eat the elephant one bite at a time. It is my policy as well to carefully select my texts and follow them so that the student gets the maximum use out of their investment. Well I remember the horror of a course when the professor was forced to select a new textbook (because the one he carried with him on the Santa Maria had gone out of print). He made us all buy the new text but it was only half way through the course that we realised that he was lecturing and testing us as if we had his old textbook. Promises made in the crucible of that type of experience are what shape us as professors.

Sleep well, F. A. Cotton friend and guide of my youth. Your legacy and legend will continue, especially since we as a discipline have discovered the importance of branding. We will bring in ghost writers to revise your texts just as we have the other great, dead chemistry textbook authors. You may writhe in your grave with what they will write in your name but your name will go on.

Testing Cumulative Knowledge

2007-02-10T11:30:00.000-08:00

"Education is what survives
when what has been learned
has been forgotten"

B. F. Skinner, Behaviourist

In the liberal arts it is assumed that the intent of both the student and the institution is the development of an educated worldview. A worldview that will be useful to the student in developing an attitude towards new knowledge and contextualizing life experiences. There is also an expectation that the education will be "useful" right out of the box. That expresses the hope that a graduate will have developed a mastery both of content (direct knowledge) and process (how to learn and teach).

In chemistry, knowledge is cumulative. Just as in a language, progress can only occur when the student has remembered the previous lesson(s). In fact, the language of science is mathematics (or more correctly the mystical symbols that we use to capture our thoughts about mathematical truths). In math, knowledge and content and progress are intimately linked in an upward spiral. As we fall way from the maths into the physical sciences and then the natural sciences or more observational sciences we begin to see the disciplines becoming so chopped up that it is possible to develop courses that are completely self-contained and there are no expectations of knowledge prior to the course and indeed no consequences to forgetting, after the course.

Into this tension between the global goals of the liberal arts education, usefulness and continuity of knowledge comes the physical sciences professor. When I started out, I taught at three different universities in four years and at each university they had me attend their "Teaching Essentials for New University Professors" full day symposium thingy. I went for the brownie points, free lunch and the chance to escape diaper duty for a full Saturday. Anyhoo, in all of the presentations it was made clear to us that a fair test only tested topics that had been clearly covered in the course and were completely covered in the supporting readings for the course.

In my courses, where there is a clear link to the content of a previous course (for example second year organic chemistry and first year general chemistry) it is my habit to have a mid-term test in the second week of classes. This mid-term will only test material from the previous course that is directly related to topics that will be taught in this course). In my opinion it gets all the students walking in the same direction, cleans up any differences between in-house and transfer students and it forces them to realize that there are some principles so fundamental that they form connections between prior knowledge and the current course.

For this I am constantly harassed by the students and my fellow faculty. In response, I voice the ideals that I used to begin this post. We have enough of a liberal arts tradition in our university that the ability to invoke the ideals means that I have thought this through and people will leave me alone. The only concession that I have made over the years is that I will have three mid-tern tests and will allow the student to have the lowest test mark dropped. Personally I think I caved on the ideal but there is a direct link between how a student does on the first mid-term and the final exam.

Teaching Female Students

2007-02-03T11:01:00.000-08:00

The physical science blogosphere has been humming recently about the role of female students and faculty in the physical sciences.

It is an ongoing (and somewhat defining) issue with the blogs at FSP [Link] and Propter Doc [Link] but a recent confessional at a popular chemistry blog (The Chem Blog [Link]) initiated a wider discussion.

My history with female students and professors goes all the way back to when I started University in 1979. I was fortunate to fall into a group of students that was more than 50% female and while the larger fraction of my professors were male ex patriot Brits there was a significant and constant presence of female instructors and faculty in my academic life. It is true that in the Chemistry building I was there when the space crunch was so bad that they renovated a women's washroom for the office of a new male faculty member. In all my years as a male student in contact with female students it was my overall impression (from both observation and discussion with my fellow students) that the issue from their perspective had both positive and negative aspects. Chemistry, as I knew it, was enough of a meritocracy that intelligent, motivated women were encouraged by the same system that encouraged me.

When it came time for me to get a faculty position the difference became stark and clear. I came into the system when the hiring cycle was at a low and in all of Canada there were only eight positions advertised for my sub-discipline. In the competition that I won there were 56 applicants. It was clearly explained to me that up to the time that the Board of Governors signed my contract my job offer could be withdrawn if any equivalent female applicant from any country applied for the position that I won. The hiring pendulum was swinging strongly with a bias against my gender.

In that faculty position I found that the student evaluations were rather elaborate and involved a self description by the student. It was in this way that I found that I in fact had a significant communication problem with below average female students. I attended special professional development weekend seminars and presentations and eventually came to understand that the communication problem was due to my difficulty with stupidity. It turned out that the weak male students were used to being bluntly told in the public school system that they were going to fail if they did not change. The weak female students were not used to this message. Indeed, in conversations with some of them it came out that I was the first person in their entire life that seemed willing to fail them for not meeting a standard. Their interpretation of this situation was almost universally that I was going to fail them because I did not like them (not that they had not mastered 51% of the material covered). I was never able to bridge that communication divide.

My research group at that same time consisted mostly of undergraduate and graduate students with the post-doc du jour (I was never able to afford 2 at the same time). I always had a significant female % of my research group. What was very, very, very aggravating was that the female honours students I supervised all said they wanted careers in science and I cultivated them and published their work only for them all, yes all, to fly off the medical school at the first opportunity. Now all-in-all these women were vibrant, bright young women (I remember one that travelled with my research group to a conference and the night before she was to present her poster she "discovered" something called Electric Jello and she spent the morning wearing sunglasses and leaning on her poster ... she still got second prize for the best undergraduate poster ... remember that Chemistry is a meritocracy) and they are probably good medical doctors. My problem was that the most important thing I needed from my undergraduate students was not publishable research but for them to go from my group to the research group of one of my senior colleagues and thus build up my credit in the academic community. I will not say that I wasted my money but the benefits to my research were minimal.

I walked away from that faculty position (ironically the same year that I was granted tenure and promoted) to help start a new Science program at a small liberal arts and science University. The demographics here are probably typical for our type of institution (about 60+% female). It was my experience here that lead me to make the following comment on The Chem Blog when the women in science issue was broached.

"This issue needs to be addressed for more than just academic reasons of fairness of opportunity. Look at the demographics of your undergraduate programs our university undergraduate populations have become predominantly female (in some cases up to 60%).

It is not overstating the case that the modern University has got to be able to understand the 17 year old female student (to retain her until graduation). The modern university needs to create a learning environment that is welcoming to the young female scientist.

What your post in fact is addressing (somewhat obliquely) is a belief that academic environments and learning environments promote male OR female participation. I think that to an extent you are mistaken. There is enough of a meritocracy in what we do (that in my experience is gender blind) to allow anyone to succeed. It seems however that success is coupled to personality traits (ambition, stubbornness and self confidence) which some people (male or female) for one reason or another simply do not have. Every chemistry department that I have been in has the “Failed Genius Professor” that is so clearly more intelligent than anyone else in the department but for one reason or another the potential was never realized. We either have to change our definition of what it means to be a successful university academic or we change the system.
" [Link]

Distribution of Intelligence and Demographics

2007-01-20T00:02:00.000-08:00

There is an interesting debate going on right now in the blogosphere over the writings of Charles Murray (famous for writing "The Bell Curve"). It is mentioned in "Confessions of a Community College Dean" (LINK) and in "Uncertain Principles" (Link).

Charles Murray claims the intellectual highground of the objective academic reporting the numerical results and deducing the rational consequences. By design or by mis-chance his writings come across as "stealth racism" and the intuitive hackles of many academics have been raised.

Murray has more recently been writings essays for the New York Times:

Murray Link 1
Murray Link 2
Murray Link 3

There is summary of Murray's position by Eric Johnson in the comments for the post in Uncertain Principles that to my eyes seems a rather dispassionate distillation:

"There is such a thing as absolute, objective, quantifiable intelligence (whether what we call IQ measures it or not, and whether it can even be described by a scalar period)

That intelligence is a relatively fixed quantity in any individual

That the distribution of intelligence is described by a normal distribution curve.

That the current political/cultural climate mandates an egalitarian approach to education that ill-serves all but the 40% or so around the middle of the curve.

That those on the lower end of the intelligence spectrum would be better served by an educational system that was less disparaging of 'practical' (i.e. 'vocational') learning

That the economic, cultural, and intellectual 'health' is in the hands of the relative few in the rightmost tail of the curve and that we should be doing more to ensure the vitality of this population in particular

That an egalitarian approach to choosing what to teach is detrimental. This seems to be a stab at the so-called multi-cultural, morally relativist, academic left's (straw-man) view that diversity is strength"

This is all a long set-up for my comment. The financial and political reality of the modern University is that in order to pay the bills all universities must enroll far more students than they expect to graduate. To my eyes the ratio of students capable of graduation to students that have been mis-lead into hoping to get a university diploma is about 1 : 1. This academic cannon fodder has the important role of keeping the numbers up in the University so that the students capable of graduation do not bear the financial burden alone. Until the system changes (and the only change that would address this issue would be the creation of an intellectual elitist University system where the education was free but the student would have to matriculate in) we have to realize that an important part of our jobs will continue to be:

a) accepting the intellectual tension of having a student body with a wide spectrum of intellectual abilities.
b) accepting the responsibility of respecting the weaker student but faithfully and gently failing them.
c) realizing that the time spent with a student that is failing and may drop your course is not "wasted" or "lost" but showing respect for the money they spent for their education and hoping that some knowledge will remain so that the general population will understand what we do.

Syllabi

2007-01-19T11:34:00.000-08:00

There was a cogent post over on FemaleScienceProfessor a while back about the crafting of course syllabi.

Link to post on FSP

In our little school we are currently dealing with the issue of wireless devices and at this point the University is allowing each professor to set their own policy as long as it is clearly stated in the syllabus."

I was indifferent to the whole issue except as an avenue for cheating until I had occasion to sit in a large undergraduate class during a lecture where a significant number of students were "taking notes" on their laptops. I realized two things:

1) For the most part the students with computers were not using them to take notes but were engaged in email exchanges and surfing the internet. Several students were playing games.

2) It was not just the students with the computers that were missing the point of the lectures but there was a clear "Cone of Distraction" that spread out behind each student using a computer in class.

If you have students using computers in your class I strongly recommend that you simply place a monitoring camera at the back of the room to see if there is a problem. On a certain level I could care less about the deadhead student that chooses to ignore my lecture (although I honestly do not understand why such a student would bother to come to class where the attendance is not recorded). My concern is the weak to average student that is easily distracted by the computers.

I know that this will place me in the Luddite / dinosaur class of professors but this is what I have in my syllabi now:

"Course Policy on Wireless Devices: The nature of the course content and the evaluation of the individual students knowledge requires that this course have a strict policy on wireless devices (laptops, cell phones, PDAs, handheld computers, pagers and all similar devices). In general, students should not bring wireless devices to any class, tutorial, laboratory or examination. Students found to be in possession of a wireless device during a quiz, test or examination will be given an automatic mark of 0% on the quiz, test or examination even if the device is turned off and a subsequent examination of the devices connection log reveals that the device was not used during the quiz, test or examination. This policy will extend to all students in a group that include a student found in possession of such a device (where they are being evaluated in a group activity). Exemptions from this policy may only be given to students that have a documented reason for requiring the device. Such exemptions MUST be granted before any device is brought to a course evaluation event."

The Problem of the Modern Science Student

2007-01-19T11:24:00.000-08:00

"Education is what remains when what has been learned has been forgotten"
B. F. Skinner

Students that are the product of the modern education systems almost all suffer from the same problem that continues through their educational career up through University. They have all been carefully taught that there are no consequences to forgetting material that they have learned.

Almost all the public education models build up the student as a person by affirming that what they have learned is sufficient and that large concepts can be broken down to testable smaller concepts. Such education models have effectively produced legions of students that are like computers with huge RAM memory but tiny hard drives. The consequence is that they can memorize huge amounts of information for short periods of time but they can also completely forget the information when they "turn off the computer".

Thus, any topic in which knowledge is truly accumulative, where the degree depends on a sequence of courses that require intimate knowledge of material previously taught, will be left only to the naturally adept. These programs, such as the languages, mathematics, engineering and the physical sciences will all suffer (and are suffering) not because they have somehow failed to adjust their programs to fit the new students but because the actual nature of what graduates must know cannot be negotiated.

It is my opinion that interest in Chemistry has not decreased but the disciplined / trained ability of students to accumulate content / knowledge has eroded. This more than anything else results the in the dramatic drop - fail rates in our introductory courses.

Taking Notes in Science Courses

2006-12-14T15:00:00.000-08:00

I tend to write a significant amount in my lectures and some students have expressed frustration that the act of note taking prevents them from actually learning. That is pretty much why I am going to the Tablet PC this year and will drop the course notes on the website. I would note however that the issue of learning and note taking has been the subject of academic research.

Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research,and Theory for College and University Teachers
by Wilbert J. McKeachie; D.C.Heath and Company, 1994
ISBN # 0-669-19434-4; pages 59 and 60.

"Several studies show that students who take notes remember material better than a control group not taking notes even though the note takers turned in their notes immediately after the lecture. Note taking involves elaboration and transformation of ideas, which increases meaningfulness and retention (Peper and Mayer, 1978; Weiland and Kingbbury, 1979). But note taking has costs as well as benefits. Student strategies of note taking differ. Some students take copious notes; others take none. We know that student information processing capacity is limited; that is, people can take in, understand, and store only so much information in any brief period of time.

Information will be processed more effectively if the student is actively engaged in analyzing and processing the information rather than passively soaking it up.

Students' ability to process information depends upon the degree to which the information can be integrated or "chunked." No one has great ability at handling large numbers of unrelated items in active memory. Thus when students are in an area of new concepts or when the instructor is using language that is not entirely familiar to the students, students may be processing the lecture word by word or phrase by phrase and lose the sense of a sentence or of a paragraph before the end of the thought is reached.

This means that lecturers need to be aware of instances in which new words or concepts are being introduced and to build in greater redundancy as well as pauses during which students can catch up and get appropriate notes.

Snow and Peterson (1980) point out that brighter students benefit more from taking notes than less able students. We believe that this is because the less able students cannot, while they write their notes, keep what they hear in their memories, so that their note taking essentially blocks them from processing parts of the lecture. But this is not simply a matter of intelligence; rather a student's ability to maintain materials in memory while taking notes and even to process and think about relationships between one idea and other ideas depends upon the knowledge or cognitive structures the student has available for organizing and relating the material. Thus the background of the student in the area is probably more important than the student's level of intelligence.

Some faculty members hand out prepared notes or encourage the preparation of notes for students to purchase. Hartley's research, as well as that of Annis (1981) and Kiewra (1989), suggests that a skeletal outline is helpful to students but with detailed notes students relax into passivity. It is better simply to provide an overall framework which they can fill in by selecting important points and interpreting them in their own words, Because student capacity for information processing is limited and because students cannot stop and go over again a confusing part of a lecture, you need to build more redundancy into your lectures than into writing, and you need to build in pauses when students can catch up and think rather than simply struggle to keep up."

Exam Design in the Physical Sciences

2006-12-12T13:08:00.000-08:00

We are in the deepest, darkest part of our exam schedule and there is a fairly constant stream of students that come to my office with really one question on their mind and they cannot bring themselves to ask it directly so they ask a number of oblique questions that circumnavigate what they really want to ask.

What is on the exam?

In the Physical Sciences there is an expectation of content mastery that typically involves "problem solving" (now there is a term that by itself is a problem). The issue is always how much time do you as a professor allot for students to stare at the ceiling and think during a chemistry exam?

There are a number of aspects of this issue of exam design. Here in a small liberal arts and science college we have the luxury of being able to ask essay questions. This is because the numbers are small enough that we can cope with the marking. In larger universities, even if they don't just resort to multiple choice questions, quite often the questions are choped up into sub-questions so that the marking becomes a series of right / wrong decisions.

At its simplest level the expectation is that the professors will set an exam that the professors themselves can sit down and physically right out the complete, correct solution set in one third of the time allotted. Theoretically, this means that the average student (see below) will be able to write the exam in two thirds of the time allotted and still have one third of the time for thinking / correction / addition.

The real issue comes down to choice. In my exams there is typically choice, especially for the high value questions. Choice is also a luxury of the small liberal arts and science college. The issue with choice however is that there are really two kinds of high value choice questions: 1) the very long death-march question that wrings all the information out of the student that they have learned or 2) the shorter, thinking question that tests what the student understands. If a student decides to answer three death march questions they are going to run out of time and many a tear-stained final exam has ended with the ink trailing off the last page scrawling "ran out of time, exam too long". On the other hand if you have a student that is smarter than the average bear a canny choice of questions can have them out of the exam with a high mark even though they only wrote out one an a half pages of material.

No one ever said that life, or exams, were fair. A University is not a democracy, it is a meritocracy. Perversely, things get easier as you get smarter and harder as you get weaker. Almost Darwinian.

Deadwood in the Liberal Arts and Sciences

2006-12-09T13:39:00.000-08:00

Deadwood is an expression referring to tenured faculty that have reached the point of burn-out and unfortunately it has occurred before they can retire early. These professors feel entitled to their paycheques (and let's face it what they do can hardly be called a job) because, back when the dinosaurs ruled the Earth, they did some amazing things, they developed new courses, had an active research program and served on committees that shaped the policy and direction of the whole University.

Now, well now is another story. They gather in each others offices and gnaw the dry bones of old arguments. They deliver their courses as if someone pulls a string out of their back and the lectures just roll out of them. They, in fact, have unlimited time at their disposal and keen intellects so that they can quickly move from "harmless old farts" to very dangerous foes. Their enemy is change, their call to arms is merit and their moto is tradition.

All Universities have them. They are a necessary evil of the tenure process. Indeed, the whole idea of tenure almost requires that the same system that is designed to form new faculty will leave some of them mangled and in the healing they become twisted versions of what they were before.

The problem that is particularly evident in the liberal arts and science university is that the committees that meet to review the files on tenure applicants are often multi-disciplinary. This means that each time they meet there is a requirement to re-define all the terms about what a peer reviewed article is and what value a book has to a chapter to a review to a journal article to a conference proceeding to a conference presentation. All of this becomes uniquely defined by the academic backgrounds of the committee members.

We all know, that in all situations, academics will draw the line between right and wrong, adequate and inadequate just microscopically less then their own position in the discipline. It is the very arbitrariness of this setting of standards that can get applicants upset. In the liberal arts and science tradition strict formulae for research + teaching + service are not favoured because they will always end up favouring activity of one sort over another or imposing the norms for one discipline over another.

That is where the deadwood grows.

New Teaching Methods in the Liberal Arts Classroom

2006-12-08T04:49:00.000-08:00

Oh yeah, we had a slick talking, peer-study program selling guy blow through our school a few years back. A bunch of us got prepared and redeveloped our course and went into peer-study in a big way. We did the placement tests and followed the program for creating effective peer-study groups and then sold it to the students as if we were selling life insurance on commission.

It was a disaster.

In my case (I teach Chemistry) I had an almost twice as high drop-out rate. What happened over and over again was that the weaker students were forced into intimate contact with motivated, intelligent students. This did not cause them to aspire to a higher standard but in fact caused them to despair. By the time we put out the fires we decided that an important dynamic in our courses was "plausible deniability" for the mediocre to weak students and if they found out too early that learning was hard work they would all just fold up and switch majours to Business.

I Ate an Apple for Lunch Today

2006-12-08T04:32:00.000-08:00

Just another post in my repository of the mundane.

A Teaching Philosopy

2006-12-07T06:51:00.000-08:00

I have taught at the University level since 1989 and have learned over the years that a self-referential style that focuses on what I found interesting and how I understood that material is a minimalist teaching philosophy that works for a very small sub-set of most classes. This, however, is exactly the way most science courses are taught.

Since my first years of teaching I have come to a couple of realizations about what creates the most effective learning environment.

Priority #1 The teacher must love what they teach

Priority #2 The teacher must love who they teach

This may seem to be backward but I have found over and over again that this has to be true. If the teacher does not love what they teach... if they are not somehow consumed by the subject then they will always be willing to compromise the principles of what they are teaching for who they are teaching. Especially in small classes where the subjective mentor - student interaction can overwhelm the objective mastery of content.

This, by the way, explains the elements of evangelicalism that people find in the different disciplines. This fervent, low-key evangelical spirit that whispers to the students "this is an amazing, wonderful world and there is a way to understand how this small part of it works, I understand this path and want you to know it too. I need you to respond by capturing for at least a moment the sense of wonder and lostness that I felt when I first understood this path to knowledge and truth. I also need you to hold this torch up when it is my turn to set it down". If the person who teaches does not feel that they are somehow in possession of a precious truth then I don't know how they force themselves to teach. I know over and over from talking to students that it was just such a teacher that first gave them the idea of advanced studies.

Yes, we have to love the students but we have got to love what we teach. We have got to feel that the truth that we have fought so hard to understand is worth passing on and worth maintaining.

Now, to be complete we do have to allow for the deadwood response "I do it for the money" but I doubt that anyone would be happy with that for a teaching philosophy.

An Answer is not Always a Solution

2006-12-06T07:04:00.000-08:00

Students benefit from the whole concept of part marks. There is of course a tension that immediately develops concerning the nature of a correct response to a question. Does the question require that a final correct answer is the key objective or does the question imply that the student should follow a path to the correct answer and that the path may in fact be more important than the destination itself. In my mind I have always distinguished between the answer and the solution of a question. This has everything to do with part marks.

The answer to a question is brief to the point of a single number with units. A solution describes a complete path from the question to the final answer.

If students expect part marks for solutions that have incorrect final answers then they must also be willing to accept only part marks if the solution is incomplete even if the final answer is correct. The problem of course is assessing where on the path did the student make a mistake and does that demonstrate a simple slip or actual lack of knowledge. On the other hand, does an incomplete solution indicate a quick mind that recognized a step as trivial or does it mean that when asked a different question where the step is not trivial they will fail to get a correct answer?

A solution may be brilliantly set up and sweep majestically to the wrong answer or a solution may be a crooked wreck of a thing that tails across the page as a yard of toilet paper stuck to your shoe but still gets to the correct answer.

In math the rigour is very high and it is assumed that all steps will be explicitly shown. A good solution at the end of a long path in math is therefore followed with the majestic Latin acronym Q.E.D. (quod erat demonstrandum "that which was to be demonstrated"). In physics, the handmaid of mathematics, it is expected that a solution will consist of a number of parts including a suitable diagram that establishes the frame of reference with the relative positions and magnitudes of the elements of the problem. This is followed by stating the relevant given information (converted if necessary to the form required for the solution). The standard form of the relevant equation is then given followed by the form that isolates the unknown variable. The symbols are then substituted with the numbers from the problem and the math completed to give a final answer. In Physics it is usual for the solution to be completed with a very brief statement of the final answer to the problem.

Chemistry is the wayward child of Physics and thus follows the intent, if not the complete form, for a solution as that in Physics. The structure is the same but usually a diagram is not required and a completing statement is generally not necessary as long as the solution sequence gives a clear final answer.

Student Classifications

2006-12-05T11:09:00.000-08:00

There is just no way around it and that is the simple fact that students always seem to fall into a few basic catagories corresponding to their grade level.

Amazing A: Intelligent and disciplined. You are teaching a mind better than your own and when you give them what you know they understand it better than you. You wake up in the morning with the prayer that you don't mislead them

Tough A: The most frustrating class of student usually couples an amazing ability to memorize huge amounts of material with a startling work ethic. Will allow themselves to be consumed and overwhelmed by the subject matter and are often frustrated by trivial aspects of the topic. Real problem with this class of student is the almost complete lack of reflection or retention. Will often attempt to get a good mark not by getting the intelligent right answer but by overwhelming with all possible answers to take the marking decision out of your hands.

Thinking B: Smarter than the average bear and willing to work. Good attitude and is able to show a level of true understanding of the material. Not only will come to office and ask questions but about things related to course from their regular lives.

Unthinking B: Has not learned a thing in the course but is willing to work hard to memorize sufficient material to get desired grade and will complete all the assignments exactly as asked for. Will come to office for help but really wants you to answer question so they can just copy and memorize.

Average C: More rare than one would expect (see previous post).

Deadbeat D: Capable of much better work but has decided for whatever reason to focus on other things and has a built in compass that lets them find the minimum passing mark.

Thrasher D: Leftbehind F student with a work ethic.

Deadbeat F: Could care less about the course and refuses to do any work .

Leftbehind F: Really shouldn't be in the specific University course (and probably the degree in general) sometimes because of poor preparation or discipline and is not capable of handling the material.

Of course it is possible to mix-and-match these catagories. I have rarely come in contact with Deadbeat B students that qualified as geniuses but had the dedication of a three-toed sloth. That is probably why there is so much busy work in my courses (to goad these students out of a superior sense of "I could make an A if I cared" and put the fear of failure into them). On the other hand the busy work also gives the weaker students a place to shine (Wow Bobby, that graph is beautiful ... wrong data and sloped the wrong way .. but still worth something more than 0). In addition there is the Poisonous Student at all grade levels that just makes teaching the class a misery either by undermining your authority if they are smart or constantly slowing the class down if they are not.

The Average Science Student

2006-12-04T07:17:00.000-08:00

The average science student does not exist except in a set of ideals that changes from faculty member to faculty member and from discipline to discipline. The way that I was taught, and was taught to teach, leads me to the following set of ideals:

It is assumed that the average student has a University degree as their primary immediate goal.

The average student should get a grade of C.

The average student should understand 2/3 of the material taught.

The grade should be independent of the actual work done and should reflect only what the student has demonstrated that they understand.

The average student should expect that their study for any course should be two hours of personal study for every hour of instruction. So an average student taking five lecture courses of three hours a week (15 hours of instruction) should expect to spend an addtional 30 hours a week on personal study.

The average student can do all the work necessary for their courses during the weekdays (8 AM - 5 PM, 9 hours a day and five days a week gives 45 hours) and evenings.

If an average student wants a better mark than C they have to work harder and longer.

If a below average student wants a mark of C they have to work longer and harder than and average student would to get the same C grade.

It is very common for above average students to "settle" for a grade of C or even lower so that they can live a more relaxed lifestyle with free time for jobs and a social life. There is nothing wrong with this but the student must live with the tension between their potential mark if they had have worked and their actual mark.

The most significant problem with students that "settle" for a mark lower than they could potentially achieve is that they often set the model for less able students that cannot afford the luxuries of ample free time and/or jobs with a high number of working hours a week.

If the average student wants to have a job they have to work more efficiently than an average student that does not have a job.

Friction Between Science and Humanities Students

2006-12-02T17:20:00.000-08:00

At our institution the disparity in workload is obvious to everyone. The humanities core to all the degrees that we have means that the Science students are acutely aware of the lack of work and discipline that Humanities students can demonstrate and still pass their courses. The typical Science student, even one that just wants a 65% C grade, has a lab report and an assignment due each week in their Science courses. The incremental and cumulative nature of Science courses means that the student has to be constantly working at their courses even if they are doing poorly. The Humanities students on the other hand quite often do not attend their lectures and know that if they just pull a couple of "all nighters" they can get their C on the term paper and the final exam. This means that they can spend their time during the semester playing cards or groping their significant other in the Great Hall.

This stereotype truly bothers the Science students because they see it enough to believe the image. The truth is that these slacker Humanities students will often fail out of University, it is just that when they leave it is after a semester or two of relatively guiltless slacking off. The Science student that fails out however has been subjected to a corrosive sequence of failure that leaves them scarred and often ashamed of themselves.

It is one thing to not care, not work and be declared a failure. It is another thing entirely to actually try week after week and just not get it and then be told you are a failure.

That is the value of having Science buildings separate from the Humanities buildings. The students are not faced with the somewhat different ethos of other departments. The separation allows for a smaller, more homogeneous sub-community and more importantly a culture that values and encourages the week to week discipline. We do not have that luxury.

In addition to my Chemistry courses I teach a History of Science course and get Humanities students in that course mixed with my Science students. I have actually had students tell me that they were dropping my course even though they were completely happy with the course content but were unwilling to make a week-to-week commitment to the course. They expected to be able to serially focus on their courses.

It is true that for the top end of the class, no matter if it is a Science or Humanities course, the workload and ability of the student makes for a similar learning experience. The difference seems to be the learning experience of the average and below-average students. And that is where the bitter root truly begins to grow.

Chemistry in a Liberal Arts and Science Setting

2006-12-02T14:00:00.000-08:00

Chemistry is a physical science where truth is often defined by how well you can relate what you have done to numbers. The better the numbers, the better the accuracy and precision of those numbers the closer you are to the truth.

In a liberal arts and science setting though truth becomes relative to ones starting position (or current one for that matter). This little blog will be an attempt at catharsis and dialogue and community all at the same time.

Welcome and say hello.