Sunday, December 30, 2018

Holey, wholly, holy family

All of us, at a somewhat younger age.
I grew up in a house with six kids and a dog (and a seemingly immortal goldfish), watched over by two parents who imbued us all with an insatiable curiosity, a generous measure of grit and the notion that if you researched it, followed the directions, and practiced it, you could do pretty much anything.

From my dad, I learned to bake bread and rolls and to patch and paint walls like a pro. Our relationship survived learning to ride a bike and to drive a stick shift, and (barely) the time I left fumes in the tank of the car with the inoperable gas gauge. (I think of him every time I put the clutch in on my car or my gas gauge shows empty.) I can rig and sail a small boat and paddle a canoe. I'm not afraid of a screw driver or a power drill (but have a quite reasonable respect for table saws). We fought about politics, sometimes bitterly. He was willing to ask hard questions about God and the life to come. He sent my sons a book on backyard ballistics — don't ask.

There were times when there were holes in the family, times when we were wholly family, and occasions when we were well and truly holy family.

My dad died this morning, perhaps aptly on this feast of the Holy Family. At home, as he wished, with my sister at his side reminding him of all those waiting for him. I was on a plane, on my way to California to see him.  Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord. May perpetual light shine upon him. 




About that goldfish.  The goldfish was the sole survivor of a coterie won at a school fair. One morning my father found it on the floor, having somehow tried to leap out of the aquarium. It was still pretty lively, so he tossed it back into the tank. Where, other than some odd scales on its side where it had laid on the rug, it flourished for years to come.



Tuesday, December 25, 2018

Merry Christmas!



Now burn, new born to the world,
Doubled-naturèd name,
The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled
Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame,
Mid-numbered he in three of the thunder-throne!
Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came;
Kind, but royally reclaiming his own;
A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fíre hard-hurled.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ in Wreck of the Deutschland

Merry Christmas!

Monday, December 24, 2018

Prayers!

A couple of Sundays ago I was sitting next to a family with two young boys at Mass, one an infant, the other about two. They reminded me of those days when Mass was a full body workout, as we juggled babies in arms and toddlers at our feet.  (If you think distractions in prayer are a problem, try praying with a toddler and a three-year old, then we can talk distractions.)

Last week as we prayed the universal prayers for the needs of the world, to which the assembly responded, "Lord, hear our prayer," the two-year old suddenly burst out, "Prayers!"  I turned to his mother who moved quickly to shush him and whispered, "Lest we think they aren't listening!"

I'd written those prayers, and I always worry that I'm missing the little ones, that these prayers go straight over their heads. But apparently not entirely. "Prayers!"

It reminded me of my summer visit to the Specola, where Mass was celebrated with the three or four of us who were around.  There was no haste in these celebrations of the Eucharist, and when it came time for the universal prayers, they came in fits and starts, in English and Italian from all present. For those from the community traveling, for those in ill health, for local difficulties, for our families, for the world, the Church.  Prayers, we cried again and again. As we proceeded with the liturgy, I imagined those prayers piled on the altar, spilling over, offered up with the gifts, the whole to be sanctified, to be made whole in what was broken.

So many people in my life right now have asked for prayers, friends and family both. I pile the prayers at the foot of the altar - for my dad, who is struggling with serious health challenges, for my sister-in-law who is hospitalized with meningitis, for a young friend undergoing surgery. For the nation, for the Church, both in difficulties...for peace on earth. The needs are great and small alike. "Prayers!" indeed, I think.

What will my community pray for tonight?
For the People of God, to whom God has chosen to come close… 
For those who long for light, for those whose lives are overshadowed by war, economic unrest, or violence in their neighborhoods and homes…
For the safety of those who must travel, for pilgrims, immigrants and refugees… 
For the homeless, for children and families who will not have a roof over their heads tonight… 
For the sick, for children who are ill and for their parents... 
For our dead, those in need of our prayers and those now singing joyfully before the Lord…
Prayers!


Thursday, December 20, 2018

Elements of revenge

I seriously can’t write fiction. I suspect it's not lack of imagination, but some odd form of writer’s block. Or perhaps it is too many years devoted to sifting defensible reality from experimental and computational data. Or is it that I’m unwilling to ask a reader to be confused about the real, the possibly real and the entirely imagined? Or maybe it is because the one and only piece of published fiction I wrote, came (almost) true within the year?  Would any other fiction I wrote become real? That’s clearly a flight of fancy, but even with one data point, do I want to take the risk?

I was invited to write a commentary on the elements that scientists thought they'd discovered (but hadn't) for Nature Chemistry's issue celebrating the International Year of the Periodic Table.  The IUPAC guideline for element names says that you can't re-use names already in circulation in the literature, even if they were ultimately discarded. Which got me thinking if that could be a way for an unscrupulous scientist to crush the dreams of a competitor of having an element named for them. Despite my demonstrated inability to write good fiction, I drafted an introduction to the essay that played out this idea.

In the end, I wrote a non-fictional introduction to the essay (which you can read here if you are of the mind to do so). But if I were to write a piece of fiction about the elements, it might begin like this:
_______________________________

Prof. Exuvgen leaned back in her desk chair and wondered for the thousandth time why she’d ever signed that retirement agreement. Time was slipping through her fingers.  In a month, she’d have to hand over the key codes and walk out the door.  No access to her data and worse yet, no access to the tools she would need to analyze it, that idiot of a director had made it clear her account would be wiped — wiped — at midnight on the 30th, and anything left in her office trucked out to the dumpster.  Tang Woh Kow, they maintained, was right. There were 243 elements in the universe and no more. When Tam Besper saw the traces of zuzenium in 2069, right in this building, that was the end of the era of the element hunters. The last chance to have your name remembered in every chemistry book in the solar system, if not the galaxy. Though if the Vulcans had their way, everyone would be using the systematic names.

Running her hands through her short grey hair, she turned again to the data on the screen.  She’d spent thirty years working toward puncturing Kow's ceiling on the elements, the last ten racing Sabaxoar’s extravagantly funded group on the moon. What was it Maxine had said at that last meeting? Oh, right. Time. That she wasn't in a hurry, she had years to work on this, given lunar life expectancies. And with that Maxine shook her blonde curls and floated off.  Would the director take her more seriously if she looked less weary, grey and face it, old?

Time. It's running out, was there enough to say, now, without a doubt, that they’d turned up an atom or two of 244 Sym in that last run? Maybe, though maybe that oxide of muscovium was rearing its ugly head, this wouldn't be the first umbral element sunk by 115. Certainly there was strong evidence of a new isotope of 243.  Time, there just wasn't enough time.

She tapped the bud in her ear, and started composing the manuscript of one last paper.  “We present here evidence for the creation of the 616 isotope of 243 Zz, half-life 82 msecs, along with traces of element 244, Uuq.” She glanced up at the list of proposed names for 244 her group had kept on the whiteboard, derived from the names of birthplaces and long dead mentors and far-flung galaxies and grinned wickedly. “…for which we propose the name sabaxorium, symbol Sx, in honor of our respected and long time competitor in this hunt, Maxine Sabaxoar.”

Four months later, Maxine wakes up to a tweetstorm of congratulations for having the first trans-zuzenium element named for her. She pulls up the paper and seeing the unmistakable traces of MvO in the accompanying supplementary data dump, shrieks, "I've been robbed.”
_____________________________________
Notes:  
In the 1970s, Tang Wah Kow of New Method College in Hong Kong suggested (based on an odd theory about triads and octaves) that the upper level for an element was Z=243. Further, he proposed that when that element was ultimately discovered, it should be called zuzenium (Zz). The suggested name he said was, "...deduced from a Chinese idiom 'The name stands behind Zun Zen, who (Zun Zen) came last on the list of successful candidates in a royal examination." [In "An Octagonal Prismatic Periodic Table" J. Chem. Ed. 49, 59 (1972)]

Cross-posted from Culture of Chemistry

Monday, December 17, 2018

O Wisdom

O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti,
attingens a fine usque ad finem,
fortiter suaviterque disponens omnia:
veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae

O Wisdom, coming forth from the mouth of the Most High,
reaching from one end to the other,
mightily and sweetly ordering all things:
Come and teach us the way of prudence.