Maybe I'm jaded by slang of the 80's and 90's, but to me 'dealing with' something has a negative ring to it. It sounds like a chore. "Next we HAVE to DEAL with the case of blah blah blah..." And once the writer finishes one such task, they trudge onward,"This means that we have to deal with the case of bleh bleh bleh...". And it always seems to stretch on and on. I think this is a crucial example of why science texts are criticized for seeming drab and dull: because they are. So many science writers are constantly 'dealing' with things as if the whole text is some sort of unwelcome burden to them and to you, the reader.

Exploring the different cases of a theory or a law is fun and interesting and stimulating and should be written that way. I don't think it's too hard, but it might take some practice. What would you rather read:

'Next we have to deal with the application of the Second Law to a cyclic process'

or

'Next we're going to apply the Second Law to a cyclic process'

or how about,

'Next, when we apply the Second Law to cyclic processes, we will discover that all reversible heat engines are equivalent.'

Whether you understood that or not, I bet you'll agree that the last one is a lot more engaging to read. So if you find yourself trudging your way through some dry science text that you can barely stand, then look to see if you spot the author 'dealing with it', and then you can take that as a sign that your inner nerd will not be happy...

The pundits would probably have us believe that our tax dollars are wasted on studies of mass sponge migration. I really shouldn't have to point it out, but let's all rest assured that no public grants from the NSF have been made in this area.

I don't mean to over-sentimentalize this, but science used to be front page material. Consider this extraordinary front page in the Jan 30, 1939 issue of the Palo Alto Times. This clipping ominously foreshadows Hitler's brutal campaign but also proclaims the marvel of Russel and Sig Varian's invention of the Klystron tube, an extraordinary device to amplify microwave and radio signals, which ironically had many implications for the outcome of WWII.

Can science hit the front page again? Or, should science grace our front pages again? Maybe, probably. Yet it seems as a society we can't talk about, or promote science in any objective way any more. Is that the pundits at work, relentlessly forcing themselves into these discussions, stoking and inciting others, all for personal 'branding'? Maybe - but let's consider also that the pundits could be a symptom of something deeper. Regardless of what political aisle you stroll, it is natural to grapple with opinions on the applications of genetic engineering, the development of nuclear power, the ethical uses of nanotechnology in consumer products, the testing of new drugs, and much more. So perhaps all of this is a sort of social maturing process. We are in the throes of the realization that society can't be a spectator to science. Where might this lead?

Is it too much to hope that the pundits will adapt, and try to stimulate and lead authentic discussions of science? I don't think I am too naive in believing that the nation in some form is demanding this. Or maybe we could get the Kardashians to do a science show...

1. About a mile from our house, a small tornado ripped the roof off of a large barn. Pretty amazing. Who knew that there would be tornados in our little neck of the woods here in central PA?

2. Down south, all this cold and rain has completely messed up bee production in the southern apiaries and I had two orders for bees cancelled because of this. So I have my one proud hive which I will have to nurture through winter. You can take a lot of views on this. Is it global climate change or just a freakish spring here on the east coast? My own bias is that it's probably a bit of both.

3. Related to that I planted my potatoes right as it started to turn cold and get rainy and generally blechh. So perhaps they are all rotting in the ground? Hopefully they'll poke up soon. Technically, I love this part of spring, the wild temperature swings, the winds, the rolling thunderstorms, the heat waves and the cool-downs and everything else. Just a little more sun would do wonders for the spuds I'm sure... It would be oddly existential, and ironic, if this year's rains and cold wreaked the same damage as last year's terrible drought.

Speaking of which, Henry got a quick bug and watched a fair bit of spongebob and so we did too. I've concluded that SpongeBob is the quintessential everyman hero of this masterpiece of existential writing. Fish paste!

Can you define and/or explain temperature? Harder than it sounds. Think about it.

I can now call myself a beekeeper - woah. Kind of cool, but I'm a complete beginner and novice and my only goal is to not kill them in the first few weeks. Can't wait to see where this leads. There is a lot of interesting chemistry and science with bees so maybe I'll start rambling on that.

The Large Hadron Collider has not found the Higgs boson yet. Just this week a leaked memo suggested they might have had a glimpse. Hard to know what to say about this. 'Leaked memos' raise a red flag. Hypothetically, suppose they don't find it? Is a negative result truly as successful as a positive one? In science we hold that it is just as important to discover a negative result as it is a positive one. Do you agree?

(Hellooooooo Dave)

While reading Wikipedia's various pages on thermodynamics, I was pretty surprised at the inaccuracies, mistakes, etc. There's a lot that's right, so let's not all run for the hills over this, but the poor condition of several thermo entries actually took me off guard. Yes, apparently I am THAT naiive.

So I fixed a particularly glaring problem on the Heat Capacity page that was really serious and embarrassing to read and I just couldn't stand leaving it there. That was kind of satisfying so I decided to tackle a bigger challenge: the poor condition of the page on isentropic processes. There were incomplete explanations, incorrect statements and missing progressions. I worried what may happen if my students would ever look there and convinced myself that any student attempting to read this page would only get more confused. So I worked on straightening it out and I really fixed up the section 'Derivation of the isentropic relations'. I got pretty far, congratulated myself and then got a bit of work done. I told myself I would return later to fix other things.

So in a fit of narcissistic indulgence I surfed back to 'Isentropic Processes' and found that all of my changes were gone baby gone. I logged back into my Wikipedia account and found my work had been marked as vandalism by an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm that scans recent changes and reverted all of my work!. For shame Watson! I had added equations on ideal gases, entropy and energy and this was vandalism!?!?!?!? I managed to restore my changes and crossed my arms in self-satisfaction that all was well.

Nope, the AI reverted my reversion of their reversion claiming that my reversion of their reversion was also vandalism. Are you still with me?

So I followed a bunch of links they offer if you want to protest their decision. I had to read a page explaining that the AI was almost never wrong and that surely I must be a miscreant and vandal. And so I finally clicked through enough screens that I got my changes back and they have somehow survived so far. The whole process was a massive annoyance and time sink.

Oh, and the best part: now wikipedia seems to think I am a vandal and has blocked my IP address from fixing this page further (although I can log in and that allows me back in).

So my attempt to help Wikipedia avoid thermodynamic embarrassment ended in an absurd sort of success: l had succeeded in reverting their reversion of my reversion of their reversion of a few equations on reversible adiabatic processes - hmmm, maybe that does sound a little suspicious?

So I'm done with Wikipedia.

Oh, and for all you math types, this is possibly the best check ever written.

In the world of animation (and as with so many things, I have no actual expertise here) the illusion of gravity is very hard to depict, yet Wile E. Coyote makes it look so easy... Especially in CGI, take a closer look at the top stuff out there (yes, even Toy Story 3, etc.) and you'll see a little bit of moonwalking, or maybe even a lot. So while I wouldn't normally have an opinion about things like this, I think 'How to Train Your Dragon' beats 'Toy Story 3' in many ways, including the depiction of gravity. The flight sequences felt laden with gravity and were a big achievement in CGI in my novice opinion.

I went on a tragi-comic adventure to find something to read at a major grocery store chain. I naiively thought that by going to one of the oversized 'Super!' stores that the reading selections might offer something for a the geek in all of us. Learn from me - nothing geeky, sciency, mathy, etc. shall be found in any grocery store. Walked away with a newspaper.

A chem joke I heard at an Odyssey of the Mind competition: if you irradiate a cat, how long will it live? Answer: Eighteen half lives.

In honor of a conversation earlier today, an overlooked fact is that bleach is incredibly pH basic and has a very high concentration of sodium hydroxide. Sodium hydroxide solutions like bleach feel slippery because the sodium hydroxide react with oils in our skin to convert them into soap-like molecules. This process is called saponifcation.

Saponification is the mechanism employed by class K fire extinguishers for putting out grease/oil fires. These wet extinguishers convert the oil and grease which fuel the fire into soap! A thick soapy foam forms over the fire which suffocates the fire. Additionally, it is widely claimed that the saponification reaction is endothermic (absorbs energy) and helps to cool the fire - this is certainly plausible and elegant, but grease fires are extremely hot, and so it's hard to know how important this chemical cooling effect really is in extinguishing the fire.

Two days ago I stumbled on a paper that may have scooped a colleague of mine. That's never fun, but it's a reality of science. In this case it would be unfortunate I think because it was theoretical work and his was an especially good idea in my opinion and I had encouraged this colleague to pursue it. I maintain that the situation is a little like how Michelangelo said that one doesn't sculpt stone but merely discover the figure that was buried inside. Science works like that - with a lot of smart people on the hunt, it is likely that multiple people will stumble across the same good idea.

There are a few silver linings to being scooped; in science we've all learned to make the best of it. One thing that softens the blow to the ego is simply that it demonstrates that your idea was a good idea, worthy of publishing. Trust me, this counts for something deep down. You ultimately never know if an idea is any good until you get those peer reviews back, and any validation, any at all, gives you a little warm fuzzy feeling in your frontal lobe. I have a paper in review right now that presents a very simple idea, but which is counter-intuitive and many find surprising because you don't think it should be true, but it is and then on top of that it's easy too. It's the most rudimentary paper I've ever written, and I wonder if reviewers are going to take me to the cleaners. We'll find out.

What else is 'good' about being scooped? Well, you had better start writing a grant if you're not already. Funding agencies want to fund science, not write history books about it. The NSF and NIH want the US to lead the world in science. So think about it - if you got scooped then you have already been thinking about this idea for a long time and you already have a lot of work in mind that you want to do with this idea. Now you cite that other guy's paper that proves the idea is worthy in your grant proposal to show that you are on the right track. Reviewers, NSF and NIH want that proof of principle before they fork over the money. Before you know it, you could be on the leading edge of a new sub-discipline based on the cool idea you got scooped on. So let's be honest, most scientists crave recognition and ego-boosts; but if you refuse to work in an area because you didn't think of it first, then you'll NEVER do any work. If that's all you're in it for, then you're missing out on a lot of the fun and you're missing out on the big picture altogether.

In the spirit of being scooped...in my thanksgiving post, I commented that I would have said something about why it snowed that day even when temperatures were touching the 40's and no where near freezing. Just the other day, this Q&A on yahoo got some press on the answer.

Or how about recently when I expressed the concern that the upcoming year of chemistry might get overshadowed by astronomers and their quest for proof of life beyond our humble planet? Well, NASA certainly made an attempt to generate some thunder on that this week by discovering a species of bacteria on earth that is able to rescue itself by using arsenic when it is deprived of phosphorous. But that is another post altogether...

An exam means two things. One is assessment - see how the students are doing, what they're studying, are they keeping up with the material, etc. And for better or worse, it is a significant basis for assigning grades. But for many of us, an exam is much, much more. Yes, I want to see you show core areas of knowledge and I'm going to clone some homework problems into the exam to reward you for studying. But I really want to see you think and I'm going to have a small number of questions where I want to see some ownership of your knowledge. I want this so much, that if you answer a problem wrong but show terrific understanding of the material in justifying your work that you will get a heck of a lot of credit.

Now, I can't put many of these questions on an exam, because they are the hardest to grade. But they tell me more about a student's progress than anything else. And it means you have to think just a little to do well on these questions. They're not trick questions. I hate trick questions. Many times students say afterwards something like,"I figured out that one question and that was really cool".

Ages ago, a Prof once expressed a frustration something like this,"you can teach material, but how do you teach some one to think?'. That's not easy - but in an exam, the students have the most material in their heads, no distractions, and just have that question in front of them to think about. The exam experience forces you to get in touch with your inner monologue, to 'talk aloud' in your head, perhaps to doodle on the extra sheets to get some new ideas and to go through an intensely creative and analytical thought process that doesn't happen any where else. Nobody likes exams - I don't. And I'm the first to jump on the bandwagon that we overtest our kids at an early age. But I think they can create a special place in learning that is where you 'learn how to think'.

When it's time to pass out on the floor after dinner - why is there so much tryptophan in turkey and does it really make you tired?

It was amazing to wake up to snow - but how can it snow when the temperature is above freezing?

What temperature is definitely lethal to bacteria and why is it different for different meats?

I guess we'll never know the answers to these cosmic mysteries...

And why DO they call it Black Friday? Ask Jenn.

Take a basketball team with 6 players (sounds bad already!). How many ways are there to field a team? Suppose you know that player #4 is injured and cannot play Now how many ways are there to field a team?

Before you knew about the injury, there were 6 microstates: hunh? There were six ways to field a team - each possible set of 5 players is a 'microstate'. But after you were told about the injury there was now just one microstate (remaining 5 players are the only way to field a team). As Feynman said so well, entropy is the number of ways you can rearrange something so that it always looks the same from the outside. So at first in our basketball example there would be 6 different ways this team could play a game and that is a higher entropy than when there is only one way for the team to play.

So more information means less entropy...

The point could be made in a little more detail that we are bags of water full of enzymes. Enzymes are special protein molecules which go around speeding up reactions that would have occurred anyway, but are just way too slow on their own. A reaction which might take minutes, hours or decades, can be accelerated by an enzyme to a tiny fraction of a second.

So that's all we humans do - we go through life speeding up untold vast quantities of reactions that would have occurred anyway, just more slowly. Consider this analogy: eating a banana breaks it down much more quickly than letting it rot on a shelf for say half a year.

So this means that the world is less ordered because we are in it. Deep thoughts...

But anyway, I've decided as perhaps my only 2011 resolution that this will be the year I try my hairbrained attempt at a cheap energy transducer and I'll try not to walk in the shoes of P&F, which is ironic because my little idea indee will probably fall flat on its head and that will be that. See, it won't be fusion. It definitely won't break, or even get close to touching, any laws of thermodynamics. It won't be sexy and I think it would flop on those invention reality shows, and it probably won't work. But I have to try because sometimes I go to bed putting together parts in my mind and wondering if it has the ability to run even one led light on a christmas tree. So ultimately I'm an experimentalist: I'll have to put the thing together and see. Will it ever be good for anything? Well maybe one thing: it'll be good for a laugh.

I want to try to share something about how science is 'hard'. Some is, some isn't. A lot of science can be done very well by any body willing to go at it slowly and carefully. It is a very democratic discipline and this is something that I think is misunderstood about science. But where I did my Ph.D., there was a sort of vain but appealing mantra about the pursuit of science that went like this,"If it's not hard, it's not worth doing". And I like that a lot - for better or worse that has guided me throughout the years; it doesn't happen every day and the dry spells can be years even, but it's a hell of an endorphin rush when you crack a tough problem wide open.

After seeing a talk by an eminent visiting scientist, one of my research students shared his epiphany that we live in a day and age with so much advancement that we are limited only by our creativity, cunning and dedication and are in a position to solve problems of immense, unthinkable difficulty. He realized that this is one of the biggest reasons he wants to go to grad school. He's right - science is undergoing a quiet renaissance which is obvious to insiders, but harder for the public to see unfortunately. Scientists will ask and answer questions that would have been scoffed at even just 10-20 years ago.

It's already happening. For example, about 10 years ago, one human being was sequenced at cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. Today you can get yourself sequenced for something in the neighborhood of $10k.