Everyday Scientist

bad chemicals

OK, I know this is old news (Paul already blogged about it), but I just received my very own hard copy in my mailbox, so I have to post it:

I just love this! I want to use it next time I teach gen chem. I know chemistry can be hard. Look, even OUP and ACS get it wrong sometimes. And I mean really wrong.

What I don’t understand is how did they do this?!? Which chemical-drawing program let’s you make a hydrogen join the ring of benzene? Or have oxygen form four bonds? Or… They must have had little red squares all over their screen!

hey, how’d they know…

… that I love fluorophores? Unlike this person. This is what Ticketmaster used to check that I’m not a robot:

I got it right! (Didn’t get the tix, though.)

nerd tests

You know that you’ve been studying photophysics too long when you keep trying to spell the state “Fluorida“!

So I took a nerd test. I think it’s broken: my score was way too high:

That just can’t be right. So I took the version 2.0 of the same test. (It wasn’t very Web2.0, by the way.)

So that broke it down for me. Thanks. My lack of comic-book knowledge dropped my score in that category. I think my score was so high in the last category was because I said that I don’t mind the holes in my socks. But I don’t think that makes me awkward. I mean, I have a girlfriend. Shouldn’t that make my score way lower?

inadvertent secret messages in skin

Several days ago, I wrote a note on my hand to remind me to do something (fix the house N₂ system, although you wouldn’t be able to tell from my scribbles). I wrote the note in red pen (a Sanford Uni-Ball micro¹) and it disappeared in a few days.

Figure 1. My hand in room lighting.

Or so I thought! Today—days after the mark faded completely—I was looking at some dye solutions under a UV lamp and (voila!) there were the marks again.

Figure 2. My hand under UV illumination. (click to zoom)

Pretty cool. Unless you’re worried about degraded ink remaining under your skin for weeks.

———————

¹ By the way, don’t use these pens, even on paper. I’ve been using them for about a year, and just yesterday I discovered that the ink is very much not waterproof. I spilled water across my desk. Now none of my to-do lists make any sense.

sam the nerd

Oh, no. People are searching for me on Google. Two people came to EDS via an embarrassing search term:

How did they know my nick-name?

pi day

More bad news, everybody: We let another Pi Approximation Day (July 22, or 22/7) pass without any kind of celebration.

We’ll have to be more careful to remember next March 14. Or just celebrate a little every day at 3:14 AM.

(Thanks for the tip, Todd.)

what independence day means to grad students

This is a little email conversation I had with William:

I asked Kevin. He told me.

sam wrote:
> seriously?

> william wrote:
>> sure, but what’s this week?

>> sam wrote:
>>> [no journal club this wednesday,] obviously. can you go next week?

I’m glad that TJ wasn’t a chemist.

deconvoluting deconvolving

We were discussing some grammar at Chemical Physics Journal Club this week: which is the (more) correct sentence?

1. It is important to deconvolute the fluorescence lifetime from the instrument-response function.

2. It is important to deconvolve the fluorescence lifetime from the instrument-response function.

I think sentence 2 is better. To me, “convolve” is to (usu. mathematically) roll together multiple things, while “convolute” means to make complex: you can convolve two mathematical functions or signals, and you can convolute a sentence. (Unfortunately, the noun form of each is “convolution.”)

I don’t think the official Webster or Wikipedia definitions agree with me, or clear up the mess (it’s so convoluted!), but my argument makes so much sense in my head that I can’t give it up. I get annoyed when scientific papers state they “deconvoluted” something, unless they mean that they made something less complicated.

I suppose convolving is a type of convoluting.

Other thoughts, here?

watching over the lab

There has been a wave of thefts in the physics buildings on campus—losers stealing lab equipment—so we decided to have someone watch over our labs all night and day:

He startles us often. But he’s the hardest working grad student!

impeccable flawlessness

As a sophomore in Honors Physics, we had to do “special projects” and have websites associated with them. A friend just sent me a link to my team’s old website…. it’s pretty funny looking back.

The Impeccable Mechanics of the Flawless Trebuchet

Caution…there’s music, and it’s loud.

able-seaman

OK, okay. I’m a child…

I just couldn’t let that title go by my RSS reader without some comment.

Motivators

The folks over at despair.com have a new motivator generator – here are a few chemistry motivation posters that I came up with. Have fun. Click on any of them for the full-size image.

the einstein

My favorite unit is the einstein, or a mole of photons. What a silly unit! Until ecently, I had never actually seen the einstein in use. Until I read a recent paper, that is:

For 7.0 nM spiro nanoparticles and a photon flux of 2.8 x 10^-9 einstein (260 nm > > 390 nm), it takes ~30 s to switch a 1-cm cuvette from green fluorescence to red fluorescence (Figure 1C); the reverse process under photon flux of 8-10 x 10^-9 einstein ( > 515 nm) requires ~20 min.

I’m not sure why 2.8 x 10^-9 einstein is any easier than writing 1.7 x 10¹⁵ photons.

You know what? I want the sam to be a mole of femtopennies. How old were you when you made your first sam?

10 Suggestions for Becoming a More-Pretentious Graduate Student.

10 suggestions on becoming a more-pretentious graduate student.

1) Name drop. How are people supposed to know you’re close personal friends with a variety of Nobel laureates unless you tell them? Frequently. Remember, you don’t actually have to be friends with them to claim them as friends – casual acquaintance (meaning you shook their hands once) is enough.  If you are fortunate enough to correspond with one, carry a copy of the correspondence with you to impress your peers.  Feel free to read it/paraphrase it to friends (by friends, I mean colleagues.  If you’re truly a pretentious graduate student, you don’t have friends).  They may seem like they’re ignoring you/leaving the room, but it’s just to hide their envy.

2) Use and sometimes invent big “chemistry” words in unnecessary circumstances, especially if it ends up making absolutely no sense. In order to maximize the aural impact of the communicative spoken word, an intricate lexicon must be implemented. The principal objective of this is to confuse the listener into thinking you are some sort of genius who has quite a grasp on chemistry. Don’t be afraid to be colligative!

3) Do not be satisfied with only one language. Knowing foreign languages will make you seem travelled and cultured. The more languages you know, the more intelligent you seem (and the more women/men you can theoretically impress – bigger pool of candidates). Try to speak at least four.

4) Don’t be afraid to take credit for the work and ideas of others. Even if you didn’t think it up or work on it yourself, your mere existence probably inspired it.

5) Similarly, make sure you get credit for the work you do yourself. If someone is publishing a paper on trapping single-molecules between electrodes using magnetic fields, demand that your work on Fe-Cu protein mimics is cited. If the author can’t see how the two are related, then just remind him that he’s not a good chemist.

6) Belittle the educational background of your peers as often as possible. If you went to an Ivy-league school, refer to state-schools as “community colleges.” If you went to a state school, refer to Ivy-league graduates as “rich snobs” that have had “everything in life handed to them.” If you went to a small liberal arts college, refer to the products of all other colleges as “socially awkward” and “small-minded.”

7) Be involved in politics, but limit your commitment. Feel free to engage in political discourse and debate, but if you are losing don’t admit defeat. Instead, respond that you don’t have time to think about politics, since you’re thinking so much about science. Advise them that if they were “good chemists” and “serious scientists,” they wouldn’t be thinking so much about politics anyway. Treat sports similarly.

8) Don’t be afraid to brown-nose. If an “important” scientist asks you to warm his seat for him, jump at the opportunity. If you have more than one advisor, decide early on which one is more influential in your chosen field, and latch on to him like a tapeworm onto the lining of the small intestine. Other graduate students may ridicule you for your actions, but gently remind them that your connections are securing you an assistant professorship or prestigious postdoctoral fellowship while they will be struggling to find employment at McDonalds when they graduate. Note – you do not actually need an assistant professorship offer or prestigious postdoctoral fellowship to make this claim.

9) Come up with a few witty catchphrases, such as “have fun” or “get to work” and repeat them. Often. Perhaps use one such as “your mom” as a witty comeback to the insults of others. Example:

Person A) I don’t think your data is reasonable. I just don’t think you can have a negative turnover frequency.

Person B) Your mom thought a negative turnover frequency was reasonable last night!

Although people may stop talking to you and/or ridicule you, they are simply jealous of your unconquerable wit.

10) If you feel as though someone in your group isn’t respecting your research, or is starting a project that may be more influential then your project, then by all means don’t tell them. Instead, visit the advisor and say that you no longer wish to collaborate with your group-mate because he is “not a serious scientist” and “a bad chemist.” Then, approach the student and tell him that you talked to his advisor, and that both of you agreed that you no longer need waste “the time and materials” on the student. Alternatively, you can sabotage the student’s work (for instance, take down a critical instrument for maintenance every time the student needs to use it or hoard resources) to avoid conflict.  Remember, only you can safeguard your graduate legacy.

Rules of the Lab

Rules of the Lab:

If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.

When you don’t know what you’re doing, do it neatly.

Experiments must be reproducible: they should fail the same way each time.

First draw your curves, then fit your data.

Always keep a record of your data. It indicates that you have been working.

In case of doubt, make it sound convincing.

Wafting is for the weak.

Collaboration is essential—it allows you to blame someone else.

Always analyze your results before wasting the time to formulate a hypothesis.

No experiment is a complete failure. Publish it as a negative result.

Whatever you do, don’t tell someone that his/her thesis project is a “useful tool.”