Winter Reflections

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

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

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

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

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

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.