Qapla!

Qapla! Success! My latest column in Nature Chemistry came out last week. It opens and closes with Klingon — which may be a first for a publication in a scientific journal. 

Se'vIr lIngDI' tamlertej, tlhIngan Hol QaQ law' DIvI' Hol QaQ puS jatlh Michelle Francl. (More or less translates as "Should chemists publish in Klingon rather than English wonders Michelle Francl")

and 

TlhIngan Hol ghojlu'meH QaQ jajvam. (Today is a good day to learn Klingon.) 

Writing this piece I learned a bunch about synthetic languages beginning with Hildegard of Bingen's lingua ignota to Nobel prize winning chemist Wilhelm Ostwald's literal investment in Ido (an offshoot of Esperanto). He gave half of his prize monies to promote use of the language by scientists. Also  I was introduced to Volapük, which sounds like it could be Klingon, but is actually the name of another 19th century synthetic language.

The essay isn't about Klingon per se but rather tackles the issue of auxiliary languages and science. If English is the lingua franca of science, what is the cost to scientists who do not speak it as their mother tongue? Time? Visibility? Surely, but the ultimate cost is the work that doesn't get done as a result, or gets done more slowly. It costs us all.

So, a Gedanken experiment...would it level the playing field if we all had to publish in Klingon? Could you squeeze more science into a 15 minute talk if you did it in Klingon? Chaq!

Read the whole thing here.

Tiny transporter

 

The family chat is sprinkled with photos of what we are cooking and baking. A way of being in each other’s kitchens when we are far apart. I can drool over Math Guy and his husband’s focaccia stuffed with mortadella. A loaf of Crash’s sourdough brings back memories of tending the starter during the pandemic. Math Man’s breakfast omelet. 

Today I am trying a recipe for an orange cranberry loaf. (The recipe suggests it freezes well and I am hoping I can slice and freeze for an occasional treat with my afternoon tea!) Photos of the process went into the family chat. Crash’s partner responded, “I wish you could send that overseas!!”

“We need the transporter, at least for loaves. Like how much power should it take for a little one, the size of a microwave?”

Math Guy bounced in to suggest that you just need a tiny fusion reactor. Which reminded me of the time he created a ball of plasma in the microwave, a little tiny sun hovering between two halves of a grape. 

Next kitchen renovation? Never mind a pot filler for the stove, I want a tiny fusion reactor and a toaster oven sized transporter to beam a slice of cake across town or across the Atlantic.

All the ring tones

Photograph of Alexandra Stepanoff
playing the theremin on NBC Radio

On Friday I spent 7 hours in a tiny waiting room on the 7th floor of a hospital in Philly with what felt like 70 other people . Math Man was having surgery. There were understandably lots of anxious people, and so phones were dinging and ringing in every corner as families got and provided updates. (That’s how I learned Math Man was in recovery, and when I could see him.)

There were at least 3 other Star Trek fans in there, including one who had a theremin ring tone. Theremins sound like anxiety to me, presaging the arrival of an alien with designs on all the salt in your body.

Tech sassy

I've spent most of my life bending computers to my will¹, and for the most part, they do as I wish. But every once in a while, the tech gets as sassy as my teens.

When I had the little issue tracking down the *beep* the other night, I posted about it on Facebook, admitedly an open invitation to my brothers to give me grief. My brother The Wookiee responded by posting... <beep>

When I posted about the hunt for the blasted beeping device, I tried to use The Wookiee's style for the <beep>, but the Blogger editor read it as a tag, and since it didn't recognize it, just ignored it. Completely. As if it never existed. I previewed the post to find that all my <beep>s had been beeped out.

Fine, I thought. I can force you to use the angle brackets, I'll just use the codes (lt and gt if you must know) < and >. No go. Really? At which point I gave up and used *beep* instead.³

I went to post, checked the HTML code one more time to find that Blogger, while refusing to do anything with my <beep>, still thought it should be closed up, so for every <beep> in my text, Blogger had added a </beep> at the end of the post:

</beep></beep></beep></beep></beep></beep></beep>

I think I liked it better when my tech was less sassy.

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1. I wrote my first computer program in 1970, for the Sigma 7 computer housed at UC Irvine², and uploaded it via paper tape.

2. That particular computer is famous for being the computer upon which the first Star Trek game was written.
3. You may be wondering just how I got Blogger to cooperate and do as I said. The key was handcoding the post in HTML and using the ASCII codes, #60 and #62 instead of the mnemonics lt and gt.

Inadvertent chemists

I just finished another Thesis column for Nature Chemistry (about chemistry sets). While writing I wondered how many accidents there are in home labs (not counting home meth labs). It turns out that in the US, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) keeps track of hazardous substance events. The data, nicely collected in a spreadsheet, suggests there are around 1000 chemical incidents in private homes each year, and the vast majority involve carbon monoxide (nearly all the fatalities are caused by CO, if you don't have a detector, get one!) or people who inadvertently do chemistry by mixing what they likely think are two innocuous common household solutions. Bleach and ammonia. Bleach and pool acid. Bleach and pesticides. There's a pattern here. Do not mix bleach with anything. It will not make it stronger, and it may kill you, or cause your apartment building to be evacuated. Really.

There are no narratives included with the spreadsheet, but as a chemist I enjoyed reading between the lines. The accident where the primary chemical was table sugar? Someone with dreams of space? or darker desires? a dedicated Star Trek fan¹? You can make rocket fuel or smoke bombs from sugar and saltpeter². The video posted here shows a gummi bear being rapidly oxidized by a chemical relative of saltpeter, potassium chlorate. Watch closely and you can see the charcoaled bear being popped out of the tube!

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1. In an episode of the original Star Trek (Arena), Kirk grabs various rocks to make an explosive mixture and an improvised bazooka. Watch it here.
2. sal petrae, "salt of rock, " otherwise known to chemists as potassium nitrate, KNO₃

_{A version of this post appeared on The Culture of Chemistry}

Via Crucis VII: Will I walk past unseeing?

Jesus falls the second time. In the midst of a jostling crowd, the Savior of all sprawls, gasping, on a street corner. He was still there yesterday. Will I walk past unseeing again?




'Let me help. A hundred years or so from now, I believe, a famous novelist will write a classic using that theme. He'll recommend those three words even over 'I love you.' - James T. Kirk in The City on the Edge of Forever

Would I have helped that day in Jerusalem? Will I help now? How? A couple of weeks ago, at the height of rush hour, a man stood frozen on the steps up from the Market-Frankford platform. The crowd flowed around him, almost as if he were a statue, not a person. Not one of us said to him, "Let me help." Not one of us asked, "Can I help?"

It made me think about the Jerusalem to Jericho study described in a link left in a comment on the essay I wrote at This Ignatian Life. It prompting me to reflect about whether compassion is a hobby for me, or integral to who I am. Is helping others something I do if I'm not in a rush, or is my way of proceeding (to borrow a turn of phrase from the Jesuits)? I've been practicing waiting for a while, and slowly it's becoming how I move through the world. Do not run ahead of what you can do, advised Evagrius when it came to prayer, and it's likely good advice here as well.

(And yes, I do know that I'm a geek.)

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Photo is from Walwyn via flickr used under Creative Commons license.

Hei-wa: still souls

Math Man and I were on a walk yesterday, and happened across an older neighbor, a regular reader of my column in the Standard. She had lots of questions for me, and one for Math Man. "How does she do all that writing?" Math Man: "She stays up late and she is very disciplined."

It's been a very disciplined month, as I finished out the semester and juggled a number of writing deadlines (about 7000 words sent out to three different editors, in eight different pieces, ranging in length from 250 words to just over 3000 words). I've missed writing in this space, with its lack of constraints regard topic, length, format or audience, but have missed more being able to read freely. Still, I've managed to stay on a relatively even keel, partly because, despite Math Man's comment, I've given up giving up sleep.

Patient Spiritual Director has been encouraging some discernment along these lines for some time, and so I've been experimenting with finding "the mean" in my sleep. I think I've found the sweet spot for now, but having done so, I've lost nearly an entire working day from my week. (You can do the math, but I'll save you the effort - an extra 1.5 hours of sleep a night times seven is...10.5 hours.)

One reason I've been juggling deadlines is because I'm off tomorrow on a 2 week trip to Japan. I'm teaching a course next fall on silent spaces in the context of Western contemplative traditions. It's one of a triad of courses looking at contemplative traditions: Eastern, Western and science. We are traveling with the students next fall, to Japan, to Wernersville, to a Benedictine community. This trip is to scope out some of the places and people we want to see when we return with the class. I'm blogging the course here, but will be chronicling travels as well as some of my reading on this blog, too.

What am I reading on the plane? Besides C.S. Lewis' Weight of Glory?

• Sacred Koyasan: A Pilgrimage to the Mountain Temple of Saint Kobo Daishi and the Great SunBuddha, Philip L. Nicoloff, 2007.

• Neural correlates of a mystical experience in Carmelite nuns. Mario Beauregard & Vincent Paquette, Neuroscience Letters 405 (2006) 186–190

And lest you think I'm all that high-minded, I've uploaded a season of Enterprise onto my iPad.

The kanji illustrating this post means "peace," and the two characters can be roughly translated as "still soul" - an layer of meaning I enjoyed discovering.

I've left some posts to appear while I'm gone, and posting on the road is likely to be erratic, I don't expect to have connectivity everywhere I go.

Can you tell if your child is part-Vulcan?

Barnacle Boy was sprawled in (across?) a chair in the sunroom last night, watching 3rd Rock from the Sun on Netflix while I lounged on the sofa trying to catch up with my email (I'm down to only 31 messages in my "critical" box). He casually reached over and hit the pause button. "Can I ask you something, Mom?" "Sure." "I've been thinking, if you have a two-dimensional surface and two polygons on it that just touch at a vertice...the size of the overlap is zero."

He's right, of course, a point has no width, depth or length. And he's right that it's a bit mind bending. The polygons overlap at one point, but the area of the overlap is zero. Never and always, touching and touched, to quote Spock (orginal series, Amok Time, since we're talking vintage TV here). Now I'm certain this child is part Vulcan (it's from my side, my brother Geek Guru is almost certainly Vulcan).

He leaned over to hit play, then turned back to me and sighed, "I find the shape of sine curves really appealing..."

Of course, based on an earlier conversation, I shouldn't be surprised. And he is the son of a geometer, after all.

Parenting Tips from Star Trek

Check out Dr. Emily's new strategies for teen parenting, inspired by Star Trek:

"By implementing a command structure, I can eliminate the debate (which is generally just a delaying tactic) and move on to Actually Getting Things Done."

Read the rest here.

Looking out

I just finished another piece for Nature Chemistry - Urban Legends of Chemistry. In case there is any doubt that I am a geek, I quote both Carl Jung and Locutus, the Borg (the assimilated Jean Luc Picard, for those of you not up on your Trek lore).

The editor asked for a graphic to accompany each piece, and I'm still looking around and about for just the right image for this piece from Nativity Episcopal Church in Michigan. I talk about stained glass and the play of light and color (maybe it's the piece by Stratoz that hangs over my desk?), which is why this graphic appealed. Or perhaps some riff on Jung? or Locutus? It's due Thursday....anyone who wants to read a draft and offer suggestions is welcome! Send me an email...

Jesuits and Klingons

Ok, there is nothing directly about Klingons in this post except they are (fictional) aliens, but a real Jesuit, Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno, SJ, was on the Colbert Report last night (about 10 minutes into the episode) talking about why the Vatican isn't worried that there might be aliens out there. He did a great job (after listening to myself "um" my way through this talk on contemplative science I'm really impressed with anyone who can talk lucidly on camera or radio), and they showed off his glorious new book, The Heavens Proclaim. I'd be partial to the book anyway, given that it's written by a friend and its title comes from the psalms (my favorite book of all time) but the photos are beautiful. A great book for geeks - even if you're not Catholic.

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Psalm 19:2 "The heavens declare the glory of God; the sky proclaims its builder's craft.

Photo is of star forming region in the nebula NCG 604, in the nearby sprial galaxy M33 (from Mt. Palomar observatory).