Right hand in a trench coat

Our Retribution Will Be Celebration

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 08:19:56 -0400

The sky this morning when I left the house cast down a sense of gloom, gray clouds rolling in from the west, choking off the small stretch of open sky to the east. I headed out to run as confused and scared as everyone else. About a mile and a half into the run, I came to the Capitol, where the flag stands at half-mast in honor of those killed and injured in Boston yesterday.
I nearly stopped to cry, and all I wanted to do was turn around and go home. The stark image of mourning—official mourning—framed by a dark, looming sky was nearly too much for me.

The politics of self-identity can lead to great things. They can uplift and unite. They also can drive wedges between neighbors, turn sons against fathers, and cause unimaginable pain and suffering. It is for these latter reasons that I have found myself fighting the natural urge to self-label myself as anything, really—whether that is as a runner, or a scientist, or as a Buckeye—as foolish as that may sound.

Now though, I find my line of thinking to be exactly that: foolish. What we all have undoubtedly seen from yesterday is horrific, but it is also fantastically uplifting. Just as in New York, where runners ran through the city and helped people sort through their homes, there was an immediate outpouring of help and assistance in Boston. A surgeon who had just finished the race immediately went to the triage tent and worked with doctors there.

Runners do amazing things, and whoever did this couldn’t have picked a worse group to target. You’d be hard-pressed to find a kinder, more resolute group of people on the planet.

The 26 mile journey from Hopkinton to Boylston Street is our spiritual journey, our Hajj. Nothing will change that. Ever since I failed to qualify in 2009, I’ve spent a lot of time wondering if I have the resolve needed to qualify for the Boston Marathon. I know now, and the answer is yes—because I am a runner.

Runners’ retribution will not involve helicopters or toppled statues or international summits. Our retribution will be toeing the line, side by side with our brethren, heads high and smiling. It will involve handing out paper cups filled with Gatorade and handing out medals at a finish line.

It will involve celebration.

I headed out on my run this morning looking for some sort of answer, for some catharsis or anything, really to make sense of the world. I went out and forced a set of conditions on my run that made it impossible to do so, and so I ended up at the Capitol steps with tears in my eyes wondering if I should just go home and cut six miles down to three.

I didn’t. And so I continued westward, towards the dreary clouds lining the National Mall. When I got to the Washington Monument I turned around, and there was the answer that I had been looking for: an eastern sky filled with every pastel color you can imagine–yellows, purples, pinks, and oranges. The sun came up today and it filled the world with beauty, at least for a few minutes. And that will keep happening, regardless of how hard cowards try to take everything away.

kottke.org: Apollo 16 lunar rover dash cam

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 13:18:16 -0500

kottke.org: Apollo 16 lunar rover dash cam:

jkottke:

I had no idea there was footage shot on the Moon from the perspective of a lunar rover passenger…basically a lunar rover dash cam. It’s the second half of this short video:

Amazing. The first part shows the rover speeding off (at about 6 miles/hr), being put through its paces. From the…

SPACE CARS ON THE MOON

apsies: THIS FAMILY. This America, man.

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 21:09:42 -0500

apsies:

THIS FAMILY.

This America, man.

My wife made me a lunch bag from waxed canvas I’m gonna be...

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 17:10:47 -0500

My wife made me a lunch bag from waxed canvas I’m gonna be the coolest kid at lunch now.

RIP Prop Joe

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 17:05:41 -0500

RIP Prop Joe

"Political choices can be made after the evidence is presented, but the evidence should stand for..."

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 11:55:08 -0500

“

Political choices can be made after the evidence is presented, but the evidence should stand for what it is. If the evidence itself is rejected by politicians — as is currently going on — then the ignorance of the political class should indeed be exposed, and all threats resisted.

This should be the case regardless of where across the political spectrum the ignorance is coming from. This might seem to be a diatribe against conservatives. But really this criticism is aimed at all unscientific thinking.

”

- Puneet Opal, “The Danger of Making Science Political”

What's It For?

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 09:47:05 -0500

What's It For?:

Being clear about what we’re doing and why is the first step in doing it better. If you’re not happy about the honest answer to this question, make substantial changes until you are.

Some ‘we make money so we can make more movies’ ish.

On Graduate School in Chemistry and Mental Health

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 12:17:04 -0500

There have been a lot of very good Internet Chemistry posts about mental health and graduate school over the past week or so, sort of dovetailing off of the initial conversation held between Chemjobber and Vinylogous Aldol, which is well-worth a read if chemistry is your sort of thing (for most of you who read this regularly, it is not). Considering the fact that my most-visited post here is the Schlenk line setup deal that I posted two years ago, I thought I’d discuss the difficulties that I had in graduate school — which maybe were not all that bad in comparison to others’ struggles.

I started graduate school three months after getting my undergraduate degree, during which I spent two years working for a brand new assistant professor. I also took a few graduate-level organic chemistry courses as an undergrad, which prepped me very well for my graduate coursework; on paper I was an excellent chemist.

In selecting a research group, I joined the lab that I had planned to join when selecting my graduate school; I had met with a few other groups, but was pretty dead-set on joining this particular group, and then advisor very much wanted me to join. What I didn’t consider enough (though it’s damn near impossible for any twenty-two year old to consider enough) was the group dynamics and the advisor-student interactions.

This is the first mistake that I made, and probably the most important one. Interpersonal dynamics between the advisor and the student, at least in my view, are at the heart of the graduate experience. They are not the focus of graduate school — nor should they be, as the studies and the research are what everyone is there for — but are interwoven into every facet of the process.

I worked in the lab for two years, churning along but never finding any aspect of my research that grabbed my attention fully or even made big-picture sense to me.^[1]

This lack of full attention led to a bit of floundering in terms of project planning and focus, which I didn’t recognize at the time. My advisor may have seen it, but I was given a little extra rope relative to the rest of the group (I think) due to my book smarts. I got extra rope, and most of the group got pushed the same way they always had by the advisor, which bothered me — a lot.

A (relevant) aside: the advisor-student relationship, in my view, is highly skewed in terms of the power balance. Students are (very) cheap labor and are completely at the mercy of the advisor when it comes to letters of recommendation, advancement in graduate school, publication, and ultimately completing their education and getting the hell out of school. The advisor has to come up with original research topics, get funding, edit manuscripts, and teach lectures (among other things) — none of which are trivial tasks, mind you — but within the scope of the advisor/student relationship do not put the advisor at any sort of disadvantage. The advisor has all leverage in any negotiating, which adds to graduate stress.^[2]

Between the lack of any clear path forward in research and being surrounded by what I viewed as emotionally abusive relationships between my advisor and group members (colleagues who were good friends and people that I cared about very much), I was lost. This sense of being lost was compounded by living in a fantastically shitty apartment and my wife working and taking classes at nights.^[3]

My work-life balance was almost nonexistent, due to my advisor’s insistence that anything away from the lab was unimportant. I ran my first marathon early in my second year of graduate school, and would take lunch runs at times. Doing so, I felt like I had to be some sort of goddamned ninja to get away from the lab, run, and shower without my advisor knowing. After running the first marathon, I mostly stopped running in order to focus on lab work. I gained twenty pounds in the following year from some combination of lack of exercise, stress, and guilt (shout-out to a youth growing up with Midwestern Catholicism).

I somehow got through candidacy, but had no real way forward. My relationship with my advisor was steadily deteriorating, as he leaned heavily on me to come up with ways forward and I (increasingly) saw no such thing. I drank a lot to cope, and my sense of being lost started to manifest itself as contempt for my project and my advisor — which often present in frustrated graduate students, but not to the extent which I felt it.^[4]

I started to set up meetings with other professors to discuss their research. I met with people from my fellowship program to discuss what skills would be most beneficial for me to have coming out of graduate school in order to tailor my skills to my job coming out of graduate school.^[5] I felt like I was sleeping around on my advisor, but at that point there wasn’t much I could do but at least see if the grass was greener elsewhere.

After a week or so of my sneaking around, my advisor suggested that I talk with other professors about their research. As much as I struggled with my first advisor, I’m very appreciative that he suggested I look around and see if any other groups would be better for me. The guilt was gone and I went forward with finding another advisor.

And I found one, and I moved forward. I had a lot of kicked-puppy to me at first, and it took about a year working for my second advisor to get comfortable. But I did, and I got through. And I started running again — with my advisor at the end of the day, actually — which helped me keep a clear head while working in the lab.

I had a rough time in graduate school, at least early on. Working for my second advisor wasn’t sunshine and rainbows, but it was probably as good as graduate school can be. The thing is, I’m positive that I’m better off having had such a miserable experience early in my graduate career. I don’t have Stockholm Syndrome, but I certainly learned a ton from my first advisor — both about chemistry and about work, managers, and what I can/can’t tolerate.^[6]

I’m pretty even-keel emotionally, and I came close to burning out in grad school; I cannot fathom how people with a predisposition for mental health issues manage to get through. Realistically, there aren’t many good solutions that I can see to how to make graduate school a healthier experience. The pressures that are in place are going to be there no matter what. Better education of prospective students on the common stresses of graduate school would be useful, but the graduate experience is so variable from advisor-to-advisor that it’s damned near impossible to project what may or may not come to pass. Departments and advisors are often reserved about discussing issues with prospective students; very few students will voluntarily come join your dysfunctional family if someone else says “everything is just fine!” in their sales pitch. And so it’s a problem, but there are so many concurrent problems that there’s probably no pragmatic solution. Which sucks.

Graduate school was worthwhile for me. It was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done, and there are probably far, far more issues that I had during it that I’m not self-aware enough to recognize. But it was worthwhile.

—

1) Big-picture importance is something that I generally struggle with, and is exceedingly difficult for me to grasp (and I think is difficult for other young chemists as well). Not in an existential sense, but in a hierarchical ‘changing this bond leads to this property which … is somehow important to us all’ sense.↩

2) Cognizant that I have never dealt with (and am not fully aware of) the pressures of an academic PI’s role.↩

3) A basement apartment in a Cape Cod-style house that was at the base of a hill and had full basement windows. The window wells would fill up during heavy rains and the sump pumps in one well burnt out flooded our apartment. Twice. Also, the entrance was through the back of the house and there were four dogs which lived in the upstairs of the house, one of which was a very energetic boxer puppy that liked to get muddy and jump up on you. That place was a shithole.↩

4) In one particular instance, I remember having a Monday meeting to discuss project updates. We’d met on the previous Thursday, and I went in with a blank sheet of paper and told him that a former group member had been in town and that I’d been hung over for most of the weekend and didn’t do much (if any) work. I was close to burning out, and I was pretty brazen about it.↩

5) I was offered and accepted a fellowship that set me up with a job — but failing to follow through with my degree meant having to pay back all of the fellowship money. I started out on the fellowship my third year of graduate school, concurrent with candidacy and the deterioration of my relationship with my first advisor.↩

6)I’ve also since talked with my first advisor about this and have patched up the relationship — which wasn’t a particularly easy thing to do but that’s part of being an adult.↩

Chris and Rich Robinson — Roll Um Easy

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 14:48:12 -0500

Chris and Rich Robinson — Roll Um Easy

retrotrash: gifhound: This is how Joe Biden greets...

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 21:44:59 -0500

retrotrash:

gifhound:

This is how Joe Biden greets babies.

why is he the best?

Specific heats of foods

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 13:14:17 -0500

Specific heats of foods :

Send the praise up.

sarahsprague: dennymayo: sarahsprague: dennymayo: YOU...

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 13:05:45 -0500

sarahsprague:

dennymayo:

sarahsprague:

dennymayo:

YOU GUYS

So when I bake my bacon, I line a cookie sheet. I lay out the bacon on the foil lined sheet, put it in the cold oven and heat to 400º. Usually by the time my gas oven reaches 400º, my bacon is just about done.

This, this is interesting. I would imagine the skillet takes a lot of time to heat up and would not heat up, so you would want to put it in an already hot oven? Yes? Not sure. BUT! Flavor from skillet bacon is good.

Basically I have a lot of questions and need a couple of pounds of bacon for experiments.

OK, so: I’m no bacon expert, nor am I a cooking expert. I did this mainly based on Bacon Method, but with a cast iron griddle that we got for Christmas instead of a cookie sheet. It worked out OK, but:

I have a gas oven, and I think the thermostat is off and temperatures are low in the oven i.e. longer cooking time.

The first time I tried bacon method 20 minutes wasn’t quite enough with a cookie sheet.

I used thick-cut bacon in the cast iron skillet, which needed more than 20 minutes.

I used a cast iron pan, which probably heated up more slowly than other pans (specific heat, what up)

I did this again today, but went with 25 minutes. Still wasn’t enough time, but the bacon was damn close. Maybe 30 minutes would help. Maybe pre-heating the skillet would help. I will try these things and you guys should try things too because we all love bacon.

Let’s make bacon, you guys.

Yes, in my experience almost all gas ovens are about 10º- 25º cooler than what you set them at. (Which is why knowing the quirks of your owb oven or having a separate thermometer on the baking rack is important.)

I realized I left out a phrase. So really you want to cook bacon on something that is going to heat up nearly as fast as the bacon, hence the baking sheet method. (Which as as I said, I put in a cold oven, and takes about 15-20 minutes.) Preheating a skillet sounds like a good plan, but with some problems. A preheated skillet might transfer too much heat to the bottom side of your bacon while the top side is not cooking as fast.

OR! Stay with me here. FREEZING YOUR BACON FIRST. Hm. Now that I’ve typed that out, maybe not. Still worth exploring.

How do we get a MacArthur Grant to look into this?

Looks like I’m going to need to put together some sort of calorimetry setup to determine the specific heat of bacon. Then we could match that to an appropriate cooking vessel.

Thermal conductivity of the vessel may matter, but since an oven heats relatively slowly I don’t think it will matter too much.

I have a feeling acmesalesrep will be joining this pseudo-science soon.

sarahsprague: dennymayo: YOU GUYS So when I bake my bacon, I...

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 12:41:00 -0500

sarahsprague:

dennymayo:

YOU GUYS

So when I bake my bacon, I line a cookie sheet. I lay out the bacon on the foil lined sheet, put it in the cold oven and heat to 400º. Usually by the time my gas oven reaches 400º, my bacon is just about done.

This, this is interesting. I would imagine the skillet takes a lot of time to heat up and would not heat up, so you would want to put it in an already hot oven? Yes? Not sure. BUT! Flavor from skillet bacon is good.

Basically I have a lot of questions and need a couple of pounds of bacon for experiments.

OK, so: I’m no bacon expert, nor am I a cooking expert. I did this mainly based on Bacon Method, but with a cast iron griddle that we got for Christmas instead of a cookie sheet. It worked out OK, but:

I have a gas oven, and I think the thermostat is off and temperatures are low in the oven i.e. longer cooking time.
The first time I tried bacon method 20 minutes wasn’t quite enough with a cookie sheet.
I used thick-cut bacon in the cast iron skillet, which needed more than 20 minutes.
I used a cast iron pan, which probably heated up more slowly than other pans (specific heat, what up)
I did this again today, but went with 25 minutes. Still wasn’t enough time, but the bacon was damn close. Maybe 30 minutes would help. Maybe pre-heating the skillet would help. I will try these things and you guys should try things too because we all love bacon.
Let’s make bacon, you guys.

YOU GUYS

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 19:51:33 -0500

YOU GUYS

2k12: A Retrospective

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 20:04:14 -0500

Bought a house. Ran a 50 mile race.

You’ve been pretty cool, 2k12.

This is the only line from Friends than ever will be funny

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 15:31:27 -0500

This is the only line from Friends than ever will be funny

Soul Men: The Making of The Blues Brothers

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 11:27:53 -0500

Soul Men: The Making of The Blues Brothers:

tiffanyb:

fancycwabs:

The pitch was simple: “John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Blues Brothers, how about it?” But the film The Blues Brothers became a nightmare for Universal Pictures, wildly off schedule and over budget, its fate hanging on the amount of cocaine Belushi consumed. From the 1973 meeting of two young comic geniuses in a Toronto bar through the careening, madcap production of John Landis’s 1980 movie, Ned Zeman chronicles the triumph of an obsession.

On the first page, you learn that composer Howard Shore came up with the name “Blues Brothers,” so if you’re writing insane questions for trivia night somewhere, you must read the article.

When I watch this movie with friends, the rule is that singing along is encouraged, but reciting the lines along with the characters is definitely not.

This is a most important article for reading.

Did some work in the basement getting stuff on the walls today...

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 22:42:50 -0500

Did some work in the basement getting stuff on the walls today which is neat

Just cut so much cheese, you guys

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 18:07:50 -0500

Just cut so much cheese, you guys

washingtonpoststyle: Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson breaks...

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 10:38:35 -0500

washingtonpoststyle:

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson breaks it down to Michael Jackson at his department’s holiday party.

Next year might we suggest E = mcHammer?

Via Neil deGrasse Tyson