Musings
I am the 2012-14 Cherry Award Recipient
January 2012
"I am deeply honored to be named as the recipient of the 2012 Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching. This is a special and wholly unique recognition that highlights the basic foundation of two of civilization's most important activities, namely, teaching and learning. At the heart of it all, excellence in teaching means that professors are inspiring, educating, and elevating the next generation to help advance our understanding of the world, and to help improve the human condition. Through the Cherry program, Baylor University shines a bright, international light on the incomparable value that interpersonal connections have in the learning process - not only in the original classroom setting, but in creating a life-long relationship and bond between teachers and their students. I look forward to joining and collaborating with diverse members of the Baylor University community as a part of this honor."
The Liberal Art of Chemistry
December 2011
Earlier this year, I was honored to be named as one of the 3 Finalists for the Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching. You can get information and see the videos of the Finalists here:
http://www.baylor.edu/cherry_awards/
The school paper did a pretty nice job of covering my talk, titled The Liberal Art of Chemistry: Stories about Human Nature. I think the picture they selected was really funny. It looks like it should be part of a "caption this" contest. What I would really like to do is photoshop forward the stuff on the board and fill in the stuff I am standing in front of, to make it look like I am writing on some clear surface in front of me.
Blue or White?
December 2011
One of the things I like to do when I accompany tours in China, or anywhere else for that matter, is to practice my meager point-and-shoot skills with my Canon Digital Rebel camera. Some day, perhaps, I will bother to learn what all those dials and buttons are about. For now, however, I am the master of instant decision-making and no-cropping-allowed composition, particularly in making candid portraits of people.
Earlier this year, the "Green Beijing" people held a photo contest: Green Beijing through the Eyes of Foreign Friends. This link might not work forever, but here it is -
http://www.btmbeijing.com/photoc/
There were 3197 images submitted, so I was happy to be one of the 50 pictures awarded a cash prize.
The Devil You Say!
April 2011
Diane Scott-Lichter wanted an illustration to accompany her article on Publication Ethics (Learned Publications, 2011, 24, 84-85). Always happy to entertain a request like that.
1979.
Late summer, 1979 (more or less) -
Graduate school is fraternal, eternal, and can sometimes be as pleasant as a stale urinal. But one thing for sure: the people you work on a day-in and day-out basis are memorable, and there are hundreds of stories that only that group of people can truly understand. You just had to be there.
We were all members of Barry M. Trost's research group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At some point, we started to call ourselves The Trostketeers. We had a theme song (because M.I.C. - K.E.Y. - M.O.U.S.E. has the same numbers of letters and matches the tempo as B.A.R. - R.Y.M. - T.R.O.S.T.). I already had a caricature of Trost that I was drawing, and so it was a short distance between that and its added mouse-ears.
Sometime in the late summer of 1979, we made up t-shirts with the cartoon logo. Although this sort of hijinx is pretty common today, it really wasn't back in 1979. "What would Trost think?" was a question that came pretty late in the game. We all agreed to wear the shirts at one of our regular Wednesday evening group meetings, and we got extras for Trost and his family. And it was up to me to present these to him before the group meeting that night.
He took it really well, which I understand completely... now. This sort of bonding and group identification is actually pretty cool. But it seemed awfully risky as I was walking to his office - with all those rat-like beady eyes of my lab-mates wondering if I was a Dead Man Walking.
It went well. He put his shirt on and we took this now-famous picture (within our little fraternity). There is one picture of the group at group meeting. And then, later that year, a small group of us decided on being even more irreverent at the annual holiday party: wear the t-shirts with ties and coats and grow out a few days of whiskers.
Perhaps the most amazing thing is that the color in physical photographs is all screwed up with age. The group photo looks like this. But clearly, the color information is still there - simple auto-balance in photoshop and it all looks great again.
And, a few years ago, we recreated our famous moment (sans t-shirts).
The search for Mrs. Smith.
September 20, 2010 -
Particularly after I was honored as the 2009 US Professor of the Year in the CASE/Carnegie competition, I found that I was answering a couple of questions over and over again when people would talk to me about my career. In particular, the Why Science? Question.
I have always started that story the same way, namely, Mrs. Smith's sixth grade class.
In that class, we had a room without rows of desks. We had activity stations for doing (what I would now call) inquiry. I recall a few of these. One was a place for learning about pendular motion, which was a bunch of washers, strings, and a stopwatch. I distinctly recall working out the relationship between the swing period and the weight and the length of the pendulum. I recall an activity about geometric progression. And estimation. And gathering critters in plastic bags at recess. But what I recall the most is the day she left, during the school year, to go back to California. I recall this because all of a sudden, the room was rearranged into a sterile matrix of school desks with prefabricated posters on the wall. And that is it. I recall nothing else from sixth grade science after that point. It was only years later, of course, that I understood why that sad memory of the reordered classroom stuck with me.
I was out in Palo Alto with some friends and a few new acqaintances about 2 months ago, and while we were sitting over wine and tapas, the conversation came around the Award and then to the Why Science? Question. Just like clockwork. So I told the story about Mrs Smith, and a few other tales that followed. And then one of these people looked at me and asked, so, have you ever told her?
Um, no. We are talking about someone I only know as Mrs Smith, from part of a year in a sixth grade class, in 1968, in rural New Hampshire. Give me a break!
At which point one of my friends says, well, that sounds just like your kind of challenge.
Of course, it was. And about 6 weeks later, I was in touch with Mrs. Smith. The adventure was almost as good as the reward.
I started by looking up the email address of the current Principal at that school, to see if they had any records. They did not. But he knew there was a registry of town employees, and he looked it up and faxed it to me. Now I knew that her first name was Marie, and she got her undergraduate degree at San Francisco State College, so my memory of the California connection was affirmed.
Then I figured that she must have needed certification, and I contacted a friend of mine, who had a friend, and I cannot say too much without probably getting someone in trouble with FERPA, but suffice to say that a couple of people were sympathetic to the cause, and helped in the adventure. I then knew that Marie Smith was born in Oakland and went to Berkeley HS.
Thanks to the fact that the Berkeley HS Class of 1962 had a 45th reunion in 2007 and they put a whole bunch of information on the web, it took me all of 2 minutes to find out that Marie Bauer Smith still lived in California, went to her reunion, and told a bit about her life.
She got advanced degrees in Biology, taught at the Community College level, served as a Dean at two of these Colleges, and retired as the Vice Chancellor for a Community College district in northern CA.
The email at the reunion site was a dead end, as was the reunion organizers.
I had a few options, though. I have friends at Berkeley who do work at that school who could probably dig out some information for me.
But that was not necessary, because as it turned out Marie Bauer Smith was on Facebook.
Now, I have steadfastly refused to join any social networking sites, and all my friends and family know this. But I immediately signed up and sent her a message.
And she replied within a day. And weve exchanged lots of information, but more importantly I had the chance to tell Marie about her part in the answer to my Why Science? question.
She was never intending to go into teaching. She was a Biology major who graduated, got married, and followed her husband, a military consultant, from CA to New England. She took a couple of emergency certification classes at UNH, and got a job teaching as one of my sixth grade teachers. Her husband we relocated, again, and she left during that year.
It was the only time she ever taught at the precollege level, but she says it formed a foundation for the way she thought about education. I can certainly empathize with that idea, because it did that for me, too.
I asked her about the stellar design of her classroom, which still, 40 years later, seems like a goal that many science teachers cannot achieve.
Her reply was interesting. She said she had only those two summer classes at UNH, and she says she had no idea at all what she was doing, so she decided to do what she knew the best, namely, science.
Of course, she was doing exactly the right thing.
Unthinkable.
August 20, 2010 -
Never heard of it?
That’s a little surprising, given the star power and
the basic plot.
Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Michael
Sheen… check!
Plot: Soldier-turned-terrorist plants 3 nuclear bombs in
3 US cities. It's Monday. They are scheduled to go off at noon on Friday.
Genuine tension and thrills follow…. check!
Publicity: none… curious!
Release:
straight to DVD… curiouser!
Despite my plot summary, Unthinkable is
not another Tom Clancy novel turned into a movie: no Jack Ryan; low production
values (they rented out a high school, not that it was a bad choice); no
chases; no special effects. No Air Force One barreling down a runway as
an ash cloud nips its tail; no press conferences; no somber news reports
from the Oval Office. In fact, the soldier-turned-terrorist is caught early
in the first act, and he needs to be interrogated.
And that is the movie.
If you recall the scenes of information-extraction from (that great TV show) Alias then you really have seen comparable information-extracting techniques. But in those scenes, of course, an evil man (often a foreign villain with a dentist's drill) was carrying on with our heroes. You can show that on TV, because we (Americans) can and will overcome great evil! But what if the guy with the drill is Samuel L. Jackson, family man, and the prisoner in the chair is a US citizen?
What are the rights... the morality... when nuking 3 US cities is on the line?
Apparently, asking this interesting question does not mix well with a super-tub of popcorn, a big blue drink, and a box of candy-coated chocolates at the Bijou. So the decision-makers by-passed the theatrical release and went straight to DVD. What a pity: making a movie about an idea. As the story goes, the US box office did not like two fabulous, high-production value movies about terrorism, the search for WMDs, and the war that accompanied them (2008’s Hurt Locker and 2010’s Green Zone, which, by the way, make a great triple feature with Unthinkable), so the powers-that-be did not think audiences would even go see Unthinkable when the moral ambiguity was so high. We just don't like knowing these things, or seeing them at the cinema. Don't ask, don't tell... and for pity's sake, don't make a movie about it.
And just to make matters that much more interesting, the DVD has the "original version" (the one planned for US release) and the "extended version" (the one planned for the rest of the world). The difference is 90 seconds, and it's how you end the story.
This in from the other side of my brain.
January 9, 2010 -
You might not have noticed, but my first authored publications were a set of cartoons that appeared in the Journal of Chemical Education in 1978 and 1979. Professor Paul Jones, then at the University of New Hampshire, had been collecting, in a little notebook, a set of quotes (and references) where chemists had, in his view, overly anthropomorphized chemicals, molecules, or whatever. You can go check these out in the "Publications" section of this site. You can also see there that I have been involved in a few other cartooning projects: "Under the Hood," in The Chemical Intelligencer, and "Al Kemist," for The Hexagon of Alpha Chi Sigma.
The right and left hand sides of my brain (for what it is worth to bifurcate the brain) get along pretty well. When I do art, it is reasonably analytical; when I do technical things, it is usually with broad and holistic brushstrokes. I can do details, but I am not good at them after a certain point because my brain just invents the fixes it needs to see to make things look right.
I like lots of different cartoon art, including the style of the classic editorial cartoonists of the late 19th Century, and of them, in particular, Frederick Burr Opper (01/02/1857 - 09/27/1937). Here is a single representative example of his work, some of which (including this one) I own:
In the last couple of years, I got two opportunities to do homage drawings in the style of Opper. The first one was for an anthology of alternative history fiction stories called "Columbia & Britannia," in which my buddy Chris O'Neal has a chapter.
I won't get into the details of it, but after reading Chris' story, there was a moment where a group of rebels was hanged and the event was known as "A Christmas Gift for King George." This struck me as the stuff of a political cartoon.
I'd be happier to have spent more time on it, but when I draw I get into the drawing-zone, and I just rush through. As an alternative history piece, the idea was to be completely in character, so I signed it as Opper. It's in the book.
The second example was in 2008. Cornell's Roald Hoffmann asked me to read and see what inspiration followed from a paper he was co-authoring, a rather more philosophical piece on the use and mis-use of the terms stable/unstable in chemistry, among other topics (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2008, 47, 2-6). This illustration accompanied the article.
Once in a lifetime.
November 19, 2009 -
"In China, where I spend some of my time, you say 谢 谢 (xièxiè)… which I like best of all because it says “thanks” twice (谢 谢). In fact, when you are in China, it is commonly said four times: 谢 谢 谢 谢."
"For years, I have tried to understand my exceptionally strong discomfort with the student-as-consumer mindset that has hit higher education like it was the right idea. In my not so humble opinion: the consumerist mindset drives a wedge between students and their fundamental interactions with each other, with professors, and with the outcomes from an authentic education."
"In China, there are actually terms that express the special closeness of people within a learning community that we lack in English – such as “shīxiōng” (师兄), which colloquially translates as “school brother,” and “shījiě” (师姐, “school sister”)."
"Greg, my student from Wisconsin in 1982, whom I mentioned earlier, is still my school brother. David Smith, Ralph Williams, Elaine Coleman, Jef Mallett… countless others… are siblings in my learning community. Students are not the customers; they are our younger 'school siblings.' I wish we had a good word for it in English, because we need a way to talk about it in order to preserve it."
Well, that was fast.
August 30, 2009 - If you want to experience custom-made liquid nitrogen ice cream, it turns out you can, right now, in Chicago, at iCream.
Bragging Rights.
August 20, 2009 - One day, soon, you might be walking in your local Mall (Do people actually still go to Malls?) and see a super-space age ice cream stand bellowing clouds of misty smoke, and selling cyro-cream or some other commercial name for the product. It will be ice cream with a gelato-type of consistency, it will be delicious, and it will be prepared by cooling the ice cream mix down with liquid nitrogen. A patent for such a machine was awarded in late 2008.
When a patent is filed, the lawyers need to do a literature search to make sure your invention is original, and to provide the background. So there, in the reference list for this patent, you can see a paper written by me.
In 1994, after reading in Scientific American about two physicist-chefs experimenting with super-cooling ice cream mix with liquid nitrogen and getting creamy consistency with micro-crystals, among other culinary oddities, we figured this would make a more fun liquid nitrogen demo for kids than the usual frozen bananas and tennis balls. We were also pretty sure other people read Scientific American and pictures like this would not go unnoticed. The race was on!
So we tried this method out during a summer program: testing out some recipes, using pre-made mixes, and having kids stirring up their own ice cream in Styrofoam cups as we added liquid nitrogen - all to their gleeful delight. We lickety-quick wrote it up and sent it off to the Journal of Chemical Education; and while we have no idea how many people might have been thinking about it, we managed to end up with what will always be the original journal reference to "liquid nitrogen ice cream."
I'd (pretty much) say all of the people who do chemistry demos read this journal, and it (pretty much) spread around the world like a virus. Within a few years, making "Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream" became a staple of many outreach and demonstration activities. And after a generation, the chances of people knowing about this story are (pretty much) lost to time.
Over the years, I've asked people who were doing the demo: do you know the original reference to this? No one ever does. And when I tell them, they tend to think it's impossible - this must have been around longer than that. Well, it wasn't, but I was not about to do a literature review on "liquid nitrogen ice cream" to prove my case. Now I can point to the patent, because those lawyers did the work for me.
And what do I get from all this? The only thing that matters, in the end: bragging rights.
So there. Neener-neener.
Thirty-Five Years Ago.
August 15, 2009 - Today my high school class celebrates its 35th reunion. I'm in London as I write this, so I certainly hope everyone had a nice celebration.
I'm not particularly inclined to attend events like this,
though.
The Man from Earth.
August 10, 2009 - I recommend highly, if not higher than that, a film titled "The Man from Earth."
This is no regular "Sci-fi" movie. There are no space ships, aliens, ray guns, slime, robots, spandex, cute kids, explosions, or creatures that pop out from someone's belly. It's about an idea. A simple "What If?" scenario that then gets played out, and draws intelligently from a study of human reactions and behaviors.
"The Man from Earth" is a low budget piece made up of one long conversation that takes place in a cabin (an actual cabin, not a set), as an academic - surrounded by some colleagues from various disciplines, and who are surprised he's giving up his tenure and moving on - learn from him that he is a 14,000 year old man, who needs to "move on" as people begin to notice he does not age.
There's more, but that would be telling.
And it would make an incredible stage play.
Pure Joy.
July 31, 2009 - I direct a program where students from the US go to Beijing for 10 weeks of summer undergraduate research, and there is an equivalent number of students from China who come to the University of Michigan for a comparable amount of time. Providing this opportunity for global and international connection is definitely a highlight of what I do.
Twenty Years Ago.
Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
June 6, 2009 - I was fortunate enough to be able to visit Tiananmen Square
on June 4, 2009, on the twentieth anniversary of the (call it what you
will) events of June 4, 1989.
Security was high (mainly checking for journalists
– if you were merely a tourist, there was not really a problem), and there
were a ton of badge-wearing volunteers carrying umbrellas (which were meant
to be opened in passive resistance to block journalists from their camera
crews).
There were crews of folks in color coordinated t-shirts who were in different zones of the Square.
We were there for about an hour or so, and while the crowds were a little thinner than usual, the place was still teeming with tourists from both China and from elsewhere. As typically happens, a family wanted to pose with us.
There were no banners, no attempts at any monkey business that we could see. Tourists and families from all over, and while no one was talking about it, there was a shared experience among the adults about the day, and about how much of a difference 20 years can make.
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
rapidly
fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they
are a-changin'.
A Great Wall.
June 1, 2009 - You know, this is just a picture of a painted wall in China, but I found it to be a totally appealling aesthetic subject.
The Hallucinatory Mind.
May 18, 2009 - Recently, cognitive scientists and magicians have been getting together to try and understand just why some illusionists are so successful, and how that all works. The answer is appears to be absolutely fascinating. We all spend a great deal of time hallucinating.
Think of the data taken in by your eye in terms of a digital image. There is a highly pixelated area of rich data in a small area of focus. As you move away from the focal area to the periphery of your vision, the amount of actual information registered by your eye is limited. Shocking. Because when you look at the world, is all seems pretty evenly pixelated. And here's the killer: your brain is filling in lots of information at the periphery of your focal area based on its past experiences with the world. You are hallucinating.
So when a magician pulls your attention with the right hand, it drops the left hand into your peripheral vision. If the magician then starts that hand along one physical path, your brain will literally fill in the rest based on past experience with motion, and you will see (that is "see") the end result of that gesture, not because it happened, but because you brain fills it in. So by changing the motion of the left hand in mid-stream, it can become effectively invisible because your brain will see its invented left hand doing what its trajectory suggests.
Not convinced? Want some proof? Here you go (forget the goofy story about the curve ball and experience this in the context that I just described).
http://illusioncontest.neuralcorrelate.com/2009/the-break-of-the-curveball
Crossing the Road.
May 8, 2009 - In our youth, we learn to cross the road with safety. We look both ways; we don't walk out between parked cars; we cross at the crosswalks; we are cautious of following rogue chickens who step off the curb; in places like London, they even tell us which way we should look; and in Singapore, they are pretty insistent that we only cross where we are supposed to cross.
But in Istanbul, a few years ago, I learned that there are other ways to cross the road. The Turkish people, you see, do not say "to cross the road." They say "to throw oneself into the traffic." I like that quite a bit in its broader metaphorical sense. Because if it is true, as Tom Cochrane says, that life is a highway, then throwing yourself into the traffic is definitely the way to go about it.