Legalisms That Knit the Wounds of Liberty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.