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I just gave a class on chemical equilibrium, and one of the big concepts was that although some things don’t look like they’re changing there are probably still a bunch of chemical reactions happening. They just have opposing reactions that balance things out. After a ridiculously fun experiment with some buckets of water, we talked about an example of the first person to suggest chemical equilibrium: Claude Louis Berthollet.
Berthollet, back in 1803, observed sodium carbonate
(Na2CO3)
on the shore of a lake, and thereafter proposed the
world’s first back-reaction. The “forward” reaction in question
was the well known fact that if you took
Na2CO3 and CaCl2
and reacted them in
water, they
would form CaCO3 solid (limestone)
and salt water (NaCl(aq)). Nobody had yet observed
chemical reactions to go in the opposite direction like this.
Reactions were just thought of as one-way processes.
The observation of Na2CO3
on the shore of a (very salty) lake led Berthollet to
propose that it came from the combination of
CaCO3 and NaCl. So, this begins to form a very
new picture of what’s happening in a lake with a bed of limestone.
You look at them and see a system that looks quiet and unchanging.
On the molecular level, however, the lake and the limestone are
continuously reacting with each-other. There is a constant reaction
of limestone dissolving into calcium and carbonate ions, and there
is another constant reaction of calcium and carbonate reacting to
form limestone. The lake and the limestone, therefore, are not static,
unchanging things. They’re interdependent, continuous processes.
Which is cool to think about once in a while. Dude.
Now that I’ve had to give a number of teaching talks on different topics, I’ve gotten into a rhythm of including historical information, which turns out to provide a lot of interesting stories and examples. A few years ago, even, this would not have been very feasible unless you had a collection of books on the history of science and a lot of time on your hands. With Wikipedia, though, you can get stories, time lines, drawings, and old photographs in a matter of seconds. And it’s all Creative Commons, so you don’t even have to think twice about the legality of copying an image. That’s what it’s there for! (Though you may technically be required to reference the original work/artist/license in some cases).
Hello! Time to insert some more personal stuff into this personal blog. What’s happening now (Sunday, 9:45 pm): I’m writing a teaching talk for an interview, wifey is reading a historical fiction book of some kind, we were going to watch a netflix movie In the Mood for Love (Chinese), but then we got sidetracked trying to load photos into a digital picture frame, and now it’s too late to start a movie. We keep saying we’ll go to the gym, but this weekend we didn’t. It’s really nice out lately, and the other day we walked down to Stewart Park on Lake Cayuga, and looked at water birds with binoculars – we saw one interesting somethingorother that wasn’t a goose or a mallard. We’re finishing up a 2-wk regimen of dewormer powder that I’m adding to Sooty’s food dish. He was wary at first, and looked at me like he suspected I was trying to poison him. Eventually his stomach convinced him to put aside his conspiracy theories and eat the stuff. Since then, he’s been totally cool with it.
In addition to Netflix, there’s a new way for us folks with no TV to watch some TV: Hulu! It’s totally awesome: tons of full episodes of most shows that air on NBC or Fox, as well as lots of great movies (Big Lebowski, dude!). Here’s a good example, a Cheech and Chong movie I haven’t seen yet. Don’t know if it’s good, but now that it’s posted here I’ll hopefully remember sometime to come back and watch it. If not, well, no big loss anyway. Happy Easter!
Jon Stewart deserves a few more Pulitzer prizes. Here’s a spot where he nails the media’s response to Obama’s response to that pastor dude from his church. Seriously, what qualifies these news channel meat heads and slime balls to go on the air and tell millions of people what to think? I’d rather get my news from The Internet.
Via the Daily Show website, via Ezra Klein, via Ryan’s google reader shares.
I changed the title of this blog,
and I guess it doesn’t need any explanation or anything,
but I’m going to post about it anyway. I just got sick
of the header grunting broken English at me every time
I looked at it, “me weblog!” I didn’t have too many ideas
of a simple word or phrase that would sum anything up, and
also not get old, so I just picked a good general word:
“Question.” I usually have questions about stuff I guess.
And it’s a nicely scientific concept. And, if anyone is going
to subliminally misinterpret it as a command, it’s a pretty
good one to follow anyway. It’s not pretentious, is it?
In other news, not much is up. Research, job applications, enjoying life, we haven’t done taxes yet, etc. Later.
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There’s an interesting
news report in
Environmental Science & Technology
that hormone pollutants
can cause birds to sing more complex songs. Where do these
hormones come from? We produce them in our
bodies, and we take extra hormones through various
medications, and then we pee them out. They end up at
the
sewage treatment plant, where they’re either poured into
a river or lake, or in some places they can get
spread onto farm fields in solid waste (yes, using
our own poo as fertilizer) or treated water (for irrigation).
More importantly though, I think, are the loads
of hormones we give
to dairy cows, beef cattle, swine, chickens, goats, sheep,
buffalo, emu, etc. We feed them hormones constantly,
and those hormone supplements don’t magically disappear
(they do degrade a little, but not completely). They
end up coming out the other end.
What Markman and colleagues have found is that when those hormones get sucked up into worms, and then those worms get eaten by songbirds, it can cause problems for songbird populations. The lady birds looking for a babydaddy make their decisions about who to get with based partially on how well the dude can sing. A male songbird who is doing really well physically is able to turn up his hormones a bit and develop more brain capacity for song complexity. The result is that his singing prowess is normally a good indicator of how well-off he is. The study showed that worms tainted with hormones and endocrine-disruptors (hormone-like pollutants) caused male starlings to over-develop their singing skills, and now the female starlings are more likely to chose a loser to mate with, possibly someone she never would have picked if he wasn’t taking hormones. Will songbird couples around the world start having below-average babies? Or are there some ladies out there who care more about other qualities in a mate? Will we start seeing more songbirds in the coming years who don’t put so much trust in songs? (In which case, we may eventually stop calling them songbirds…) Either way, it’s creepy what kind of world you’re paying for when you buy a hamburger.
I’ve refrained from making the “canary in a coal mine” analogy, because screwing up bird populations is bad enough in-and-of itself. But, so far, we’ve noticed birds and fish having trouble with all of our hormones… what’s next?
This site you are visiting is called a “world wide web page.” You may or may not be familiar with this thing called The Internet, but you are actually connected to it right now, in order to receive this information. See the embedded video, below, “Internet Power! (1995) which was recently dubbed from VHS to FLV! For example, did you know that The Internet is the world’s largest computer network? There are at least, like, a million computers connected to it!
Via an awesome post at waxy.org, who incidentally sounds like he plans to digitize a number of old VHS tapes…
I was happy to run across
this cool chemistry blog
called The Culture of Chemistry. The blogger,
a physical chemistry professor, is surprisingly engaging
and interesting (as opposed to most chemists who attempt
to make prose that’s “cool,” but often can come off as boring
and irrelevant). She’s very genuine and has a lot of great stories and
background information, as well as just the right scientific
details to make the posts accurate and informative without
getting bogged down. As well as being high quality, the
posts are very frequent and regular, which is a big plus
(and not something that most academics would want to keep
up indefinitely). Yay science!
I was inspired by
reports
of
this person realizing that his/her eee pc was the same
size and shape as a paperback book, and putting eBooks on it. So, I decided to see what it was like to read “EeeBooks”
(because I am so hipster cool and I have an Eee PC).
It was surprisingly wicked awesome.
You could do this with any number of portable computers,
but here’s the DL on my favorite way to get the Eee PC to
be an eBook. Find your favorite public domain/copylefted
book on
manybooks.net, and click on the
pull-down menu on the right to select a format.
Choose “Custom PDF.” This is the trick. Set the pdf to be
exactly the dimensions of your screen, sideways. And,
make sure the font settings are appropriate for what you
can read easily on your screen. For the Eee PC, the following settings work nicely: dimensions 90x152mm, 13pt Times body font, and 4mm margins all around. That’s it, download it! It’s amazingly fast. For example,
here is the EeeBook version of
Alice in Wonderland. They have through the
looking glass too, but go get your own. My bandwidth
is limited. To read an EeeBook, I just open it in the
Gnome (Linux) document viewer (Evince), flip it sideways,
and hit the fullscreen button. The document viewer remembers
which page you were on, next time you come back to the
book. If only there were a plugin to bookmark pages,
though, that would be awesome. You can see in the photo to the upper right, it’s pretty easy to hold, and tap the
arrow key by your thumb to turn the page. Yay! I guess
this would work just as well in Windoze with Adobe Reader,
too, if that’s what floats your boat.
After weeks of experimenting, I’ve developed the best whole wheat chocolate chip muffin recipe ever. It’s easy to make using all natural/organic ingredients, and there’s no refined flour or refined sugar (except for the chocolate chips, which are key ingredients by the way). So it’s good for you, sort-of, plus chocolate.
- 2 cups whole wheat flour
- 2 tbsp brown sugar
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 2 tbsp butter
- 1/3 bag of mini chocolate chips
- 1/2 cup maple syrup
- 1/2 cup canola oil
- 1 cup water
Preheat oven to 375 F and grease ten normal-sized muffin tin cups. In a large bowl, mix all the powdery ingredients (from flour down to the salt), and cut in the butter with a fork til it’s homogeneous. Add chocolate chips. Add everything else. Mix quickly (don’t over do it), and pour the batter into muffin tin cups. Bake for 20 minutes, maybe a few more minutes if they need it. Eat warm.
Wifey and I went to Taughannock Falls on Sunday, and it was really fun. We had gotten a lot of snow, and it’s a couple-mile trail through a gorge, so we figured that it would be a great chance to use the snowshoes. But, when we got to the mouth of the gorge, there was a ton of people there, and the trail was totally packed flat and easy to walk on. So, it would have been silly to snowshoe, unfortunately, but it was still a lot of fun! There were lots of little frozen waterfalls along the gorge, and then a big real waterfall at the end. The freezing spray from the falls felt neat. And wifey threw a snow ball at me. Here are some photos:
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