Checklists Help Maintain Sanity

Or so I hear. Thus, I will use this space to keep me on track of things this week and next.

Motivational thinking: It's almost over...and then it's Illinois! w00t w00t!

Now I completely understand why it is called "dead week".

• Finish up synthesis lab reports (due ASAP!!!)
• Make and give analytical presentation (due April 29th)
• Make and give statistical mechanics presentation (due April 30th)
• Write formal report for analytical project (due May 1st)
• Make corrections on senior thesis (due May 1st)
• Complete digital portfolio for communication certification (due May 2nd)
• Write formal report for synthesis project (due May 5th)
• Write formal report for statistical mechanics project (due May 7th)
• Write formal report for special topics in physics (due ???)

Facebook Has a New Chat Feature

Facebook has a new chat feature that allows you to IM your friends who are online.

Like I needed any more distractions this semester?

PhD Comics Sums Up My Life

I don't know how many times my professor has walked in on me dinking around on the internet after I had submitted a job to the supercomputer or did a happy dance for a working algorithm. So, I enjoyed this PhD comic much:

Memory Lane: Circuits

I'm an overachiever a double major in chemistry and physics. One of the classes required of physics majors is an instrumentation course. Basically this course translates into circuit design. The first half of the course was building various circuits using common circuit elements that manipulated the current. There was greater emphasis on the particular designs that gave way to particular outcomes, such as the high pass filter. I remember the professor attempted to teach us circuit analysis using impedance, but he botched the lecture the first day of class and since then no one knew what he was really talking about in the lectures. [1] [2] The first half was ended with designing a circuit that would use a thermal resistor and thus give us an idea of the temperature of the room.

The second half of the course was on microprocessors and designing circuits to utilize the power of the microprocessor. It was two-fold. First, we had to learn the assembly language of the microprocessor used. Then, we had to understand the architecture of the microprocessor. This sequence ended with a project that was to build a circuit with a microprocessor that would determine the current of the thermal resistor and display on an LCD the temperature of the lab.

I have fond memories building rat nests in this class due to the random lengths of wires my partner often had fetched for me. [3] The following pictures I found on my phone are not one of the rat nests, unfortunately. Also unfortunately, I don't recall what this circuit does. Nor am I going to figure it out before I've had my coffee. Feel free to analyze it for me. There will be a bonus quiz after lunch.



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[1] And the seminal book, Horowtiz' and Hill's Art of Electronics, was too intimidating and boring to drudge through just to understand circuit analysis, a concept we were never tested on nor expected to comment on in our lab reports.

[2] When I mean botched, I mean he lectured us for a month one way, and then found out he was incorrect for an entire month. Welcome to my undergraduate career in physics ;-)

[3] My lab partner, who is my best friend and current roommate, was probably the worst lab partner I've had at LSU. This includes the pre-med who stuck a very hot round bottom flask of various organics into an ice bath to "quickly cool down" the reaction so she could make her hair appointment...GRRRR, pre-meds!!!

Roto-Vap Woes and Amazing Colors

The roto-vaps in the undergraduate lab suck. No, wait. They don't suck. That is, their vacuum simply is non existent. That means if you have a lot of solvent to get rid of, expect to take several hours. unless you're ingenious like me and ice the mofo down.

The multi-colored bowls on the side are acting as awesome molding for the ice.

But when push came to shove, I just went to another lab that had a REAL vacuum pump for their roto-vaps and stayed there. I even had a little friend while I did several filtrations to remove the DCU from the oil. [1] S/he ran several laps around the lip of the water bath before disappearing.
So with as much of the DCU filltered out as I am willing to fight for, onward to step two.
Thus, for the past two hours I have been adding the obtained oil from the first reaction into a D-Lysine and sodium bicarbonate solution in a THF:water mixture. Now, we have some pretty colors. Before adding dropwise:

Notice the cloudiness. Now, add some oil in a THF solution (~140 ppm oil):

The cloudiness is gone. Sort of. It's definitely a lot less cloudy. Once all the oil has been added, you get this: [2]

Let this stir for about two hours and then bring the pH down to 2 by adding 0.5 M HCl dropwise to the reaction vessel. That's my next step before synthesis class begins at 7:30am. Woohoo!

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[1] The best technique to remove the greatest quantity was to wait a couple of hours to allow the DCU to crystallize and crash to the bottom of the flask. Apparently DCU makes pretty spindly white crystals when allowed to.
[2] Sorry for the blurry images. My brother was the photography major, so all the steady handedness I could have inherited went to him.

Who Did It?

Who did it? What sophomore or junior put acetone dichloromethane in the plastic cuvette? Seriosuly. Rawr!

*UPDATE*

One of the lurkers on this blog from my school has confessed to being the culprit. I shouldn't have been so hasty with my generalization that it was an undergraduate. It was a grad student! Curse you for melting all the cuvettes. Revenge will be mine!

Moar Expelled lulz!

This time, from Skeptic magazine's Michael Shermer:

It was with some irony for me, then, that I saw Ben Stein’s anti-evolution documentary film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, opens with the actor, game show host and speech writer for Richard Nixon addressing a packed audience of adoring students at Pepperdine University, apparently falling for the same trap I did.

Actually they didn’t. The biology professors at Pepperdine assure me that their mostly Christian students fully accept the theory of evolution. So who were these people embracing Stein’s screed against science? Extras. According to Lee Kats, Associate Provost for Research and Chair of Natural Science at Pepperdine, “the production company paid for the use of the facility just as all other companies do that film on our campus” but that “the company was nervous that they would not have enough people in the audience so they brought in extras. Members of the audience had to sign in and the staff member reports that no more than two to three Pepperdine students were in attendance. Mr. Stein’s lecture on that topic was not an event sponsored by the university.” And this is one of the least dishonest parts of the film.

I wish I had known this before going to the movie. It would have added more enjoyment for the ending scene.

**SPOILER**

The ending shows Stein at the podium which he was at the beginning giving a "heartfelt" speech about freedom. His speech is intertwined with video from Reagan concerning the fall of the Berlin wall. The Reagan references simply explode at this point.

If American commercials were this entertaining

If American commercials were this entertaining, I would watch more TV.

Expelled Lulz, Again

So, a couple of friends of mine and I went and saw Ben Stein's movie Expelled. Imagine Al Gore's documentary merged with Michael Moore's having butt sex with Ronald Reagan. That pretty much sums up the quality of the editing.

There are enough cut scenes to soviet bloc Germany and references to the Berlin wall to make the film very boring. Combine that with Stein's monotone voice and a random segment of him getting lost in Seattle, and the movie ends up being a snore.

Luckily, there are interviews that do instigate "teh lulz" from my friends. The one which made me nearly laugh out loud was the interview with Caroline Crocker, former George Mason instructor of cell biology. She claimed she was "disciplined" for having a couple slides about intelligent design. Much to the discredit of the movie, they never explained that her job was a non-tenure track instructor position. They also do not mention that she had joint positions at GMU and Northern Virginia Community College. they do not mention that it was her students that complained about the instruction material and how it did not relate to the scope of the course. They did not explain that her position as a contingent faculty member is dependent on (1) student reviews from course evaluations and (2) staffing needs.

The entire movie is based on this tactic of not going deeply into the matter of each person who was "expelled". For a movie that begins with the premise of freedom of inquiry, it seems to me that inquiry ended only at the point where they could build their case and not at the deep heart of the matter for each individual.

Another "lulz" moment was when Stein said he sought out top scientists to discuss this topic with, and the first person of a long string of one-liners from various scholars was Daniel Dennet. Now, I like Dennet. I would not call him a scientist: his main profession is philosophy of the mind. And he has written a good book about evolution. But he's still not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination, and he readily admits it at public appearances I've seen of him. So I chuckled to myself in my seat.

The last "lulzy" moment I'm going to bring up is an interview Stein had with a professor of the history of biology. [1] It was part of the movie which showed that atheists in the biological sciences justify their atheism with their knowledge of evolutionary biology. PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins were featured in this segment. The professor of history in biology was as well. The professor gave a spiel about how evolutionary biology removes god, purpose, and free will. I couldn't resist but laugh very hard in the theater that my friend clasped my mouth to shut me up. Daniel Dennet has written extensively on the view that determinism and free will are not incompatible. His presence in the movie and the movie's attempt to drive home that evolutionary biology necessitates the end of free will was too much irony. Too much.

And the last relic is my friend's response to the molecular biology video ripped from Harvard's XVIO. During the video, I was chuckling due to the cheesy 2D-1/2 graphics on the screen. But when the clip was over, my friend yelled at the top of his lungs "EPIC FAIL!" 'Twas funny.

If you haven't seen the movie yet but are going to, please do me a favor. Can you count the Reagan references throughout the movie? Reagan pictures are like an Easter egg throughout the entire film. That's a new game now.

The only thing I got out of the film was that I wanted a pull-out back scratcher like Stein had in one of the clips. That's basically it for this weird conglomeration of soviet bloc Germany, chopped interviews, and Ben Stein getting lost in various cities.

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[1] I unfortunately do not remember his name.

Graduate School

I almost forgot that graduate school decisions had to be made soon (eg. yesterday).

I'm off to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the fall. That's only so I can drink excimer's perylene and other experiments.