seanmichaelragan

This, my friends, is a knob polishing machine

2010-08-11T18:14:00.001-05:00

The Neurosociology of Caffeine: Coffee and the Rise of Science in the Western World

2007-12-06T15:54:00.000-06:00

I have worked in four university-level graduate research labs in my lifetime--in cognitive science and physical and organic chemistries--and all of them ran on coffee. Each of these labs had organized a "coffee club" among the graduate students, which collectivized buying and preparation of coffee at a designated coffee station somewhere in the lab. Most graduate students I've known drink more than two cups a day, and almost every professional researcher or teacher I've known at least starts the day with a jumbo super-latte or some other coffee concoction.

It's true, scientific research is demanding work, at least on the mental muscles that give patience and persistence, but I think there's more to the institutional coffee jones than simply energy demand: I would go so far as to say that coffee, which may or may not be reduced to caffeine for this purpose, actively conditions the mind for scientific thought. I would not go so far as to say that science can't happen without coffee, but rather that coffee helps people who need to think scientifically do so. One almost never hears, after all, of scientists running on speed or cocaine, even though these are arguably more effective in terms of providing "psychic energy." Certainly there are good reasons why illegal drug use might exist but not be known about among scientists, but my point here is that there really aren't even many stories about this happening, whereas in other professions like trucking and the music industry at least there are persistent rumors. Culturally, various drugs are stereotyped with various professions, and for the profession of science, the drug is coffee. I don't have any good evidence to back up my hunch that coffee causes people to think scientifically, of course--just anecdote, mostly, and a set of interesting historical correlations.

Coffee, like science, comes to us from the Arab world. Coffee plants are native to the highlands of Ethiopa, and evidence of their use in Africa as stimulants dates to the 9th century CE. Italians brought the beverage across the Mediterranean in the 16th century, and it was in this same place and time (1543) that Nicolaus Copernicus published De Revolutionibus, and, by the standards of most historians of science, began the modern scientific revolution. Galileo Galilei, another Italian and a man known as "the father of modern science," appeared in 1564. From Italy, both coffee and the line of "first greats" in science migrate to England. The first English coffee shop opened at Oxford in 1652; Newton published his Principia in 1687. In fact, if we order the major European nations of the time by the opening dates of their first coffee shops, we get Italy (1645), England (1652), France (1672), and Germany (1721).

Major Events in the Introduction of Coffee to Europe

Further, if we plot the milestones of science as an arrow in space and time across the face of Europe, we find the same general ordering. Certainly there are deviations, and even if a statistically valid correlation could be proven it would still be insufficient to claim causality: It may be just as likely that thinking about science makes people want to drink coffee as the reverse, or there may be outside socioeconomic factors driving both phenomena.

In other words, my thinking on this matter is really not very scientific.

Think I'll go get another cup.

On Receiving Certified Mail

2007-12-06T14:15:00.001-06:00

Some folks consider themselves "rational persons." I think the phrase is an oxymoron; almost everyone makes most of their decisions emotionally and uses their reason to confabulate. I'm no less guilty--indeed, probably moreso--than the next person. However, I like to think that when I recognize patently irrational decisions (that is, those that tend to minimize expected value) based on emotional impulses, I am capable of bringing them under control.

Yesterday I received one of the pink slips in my mailbox that usually means I have an oversize package waiting at the post office. Today I went to pick it up, and instead of a package was handed a certified letter from the IRS. I was immediately nervous and curious as to why the IRS would be sending me certified mail, so I quickly signed for it and rushed out of the post office to open it in the parking lot. Turns out my tax payment for the 3rd quarter was late and they're adding a $10 penalty, and they certify the notification really just as a matter of policy. It's not as if they're really going to pay a lawyer to go to court to prove that I received this letter and owe them an additional $10.

This is the third or fourth time I've received certified mail in my life, and they've all been letters I'd rather not have received. After all, the only reason people send certified letters is that they want to prove, presumably in court, that you've received whatever it is they sent you, i.e. that you are aware of the contents of their letter and cannot reasonably claim otherwise. So the very fact of receiving a certified letter lets me know it contains something I might want to someday deny having knowledge of.

So why do I keep signing for them? When you get a certified letter, the smart thing to do is to put down the pen and walk away and let the post office or mail carrier keep it. The only reason people continue to sign is that they're frightened and curious and don't want to have to worry for two weeks about what was in the letter in the first place. But you're really doing your enemies a favor by signing, and if their beef is really important you'll find out about it eventually, whether you sign the letter or not. Smarter by far to not sign and see if they go away.

Fountains of Wayne

2007-11-28T08:57:00.000-06:00

...is the name of a lawn-ornament store in Wayne, New Jersey. It bears the distinction, in my opinion, of being the most culturally significant lawn-ornament store in the world. The name, "Fountains of Wayne" has a ring to it, and it's not hard to imagine the lightly stoned conversation of a couple of aspiring young rockers driving past on Route 46: "Check it out, dude--Fountains of Wayne. That would make a great band name." Those guys would go on to record the somewhat corny, but nonetheless successful, one-hit wonder "Stacy's Mom" in 2003. I became familiar with them through their less-well-known "Red Dragon Tattoo," a significant leitmotif in Stephen King's americanized adaptation of the miniseries Kingdom Hospital, and catchy enough to inspire me to run it down on the web. It sat on my iPod for months ("Red Dragon Tattoo -- Fountains of Wayne 3:32") before I happened to notice, while watching episode 5 of season 3 of The Sopranos ("Another Toothpick"), that the lawn-ornament store at which Tony bumps into the traffic cop who's been run off the force after giving him a ticket is named "Fountains of Wayne." It's really a fairly significant location in Tony's story, because it's one of the few places where the mafioso we all hate to love shows emotions resembling what most of us would recognize as guilt or remorse. The name of the store is only briefly visible in an establishing shot, and would be lost on anyone who hadn't been primed to recognize its significance. I guess I'm sort of proud for catching this, honestly, and it really makes me want to visit the store and talk to the staff about its bizarre pop-cultural significance. To its credit, the store's website mentions neither the eponymous band nor the episode of the Sopranos which was filmed there.

Interactive Fiction and the Rebirth of the Second Person

2007-10-17T13:07:00.000-05:00

Interactive fiction is any narrative which is at least partly determined by one or more choices on the part of the audience. It can be extremely rudimentary, as in Frank R. Stockton's famous "The Lady or The Tiger"--in which the author sets up two equally likely but diametrically opposed endings and terminates the story without concluding one or the other, leaving the outcome to the reader's imagination--or extremely sophisticated, as in the modern computerized interactive fiction of Emily Short--in which the reader is prompted at each step to direct the decisions of the protagonist and may do so using typed commands in natural language (descended from the classic Infocom adventure games like "Zork"). Other variations include Ayn Rand's play "Night of January 16th" (in which audience members vote democratically to determine the outcome), DVDs which include the ability to choose between alternate endings, and the much-beloved "Choose Your Own Adventure" (CYOA) books of my youth. Many permutations of techniques and media can be imagined.

Very often (albeit not necessarily), interactive fiction is written in the second person "you" voice, which is generally rejected by authors of traditional fiction due to its artificiality. Although a competent fiction author will never tell the reader how to feel, he or she is more or less obliged to describe some action on the part of the protagonist, and if that protagonist is the reader, as the second person implies, the author almost inevitably ends up telling the reader how he or she will or did respond to certain events. This is insulting to most adult readers, who, one would hope, know their own minds and hearts better than any author ever will. The 2nd person can work in certain situations, for instance "guided meditation" narratives, in which the reader has made a conscious decision to be suggestible. But generally speaking, requiring readers to suspend personal will as well as disbelief is asking too much.

Interactive fiction takes some of this burden off the second-person pronoun. By allowing readers to choose actions for themselves, the author can limit his or her prose, at least, to simply describing the setting, events, and actions of other characters. Authorial intrusion persists in the definition of the alternatives (which, as E. E. Schattschneider reminds us, "is the supreme instrument of power.") which the reader may choose, but at least on the surface the air of mind-control is gone. In truth, this superficial remedy is rarely satisfying to a mature mind, which knows a rigged game when it sees one, and thus second-person interactive fiction typically ends up being regarded more as a game or puzzle, or as children's fare, than as serious literature. Also, the extent to which the form facilitates ready connections between choices and consequences makes it ideal for instructional purposes, and this only serves to exacerbate the just-for-kids aura. An interesting counter-example here, from the adult world, is John Antal's "Armor Attacks: The Tank Platoon: An Interactive Exercise in Small-Unit Tactics and Leadership," which is basically a CYOA book to help prepare calvary officers for combat decision making. But even the original children's CYOA books, although clearly written mostly for entertainment purposes, contain a certain didactic overtone, best exemplified by a quote from the Page 1 "Warning" common to all of the books:

"From time to time as you read along, you will be asked to make a choice. Your choice may lead to success or disaster! The adventures you take are a result of your choice. You are responsible because you choose! After you make your choice, follow the instructions to see what happens to you next. Remember--you cannot go back!"

I think Edward Packard, who popularized the form, would agree that while the stories may be pure fluff, there is a certain moral inherent in the form itself, which, of course, is that the reader, a child, is responsible for the outcomes of his or her actions. Certainly an important life lesson, but here we have, accidentally, uncovered a potential stylistic flaw in the CYOA genre, which probably results from tension between the drive to entertain and the drive to instruct. If the lesson is one of responsibility, then clearly there should be strong causal connections between the reader's choices and the outcomes for the story, so that the reader is encouraged to think ahead about what the potential consequences of a certain course might be. But very often in the genre one finds a causal disconnect between choices and outcomes; an example, here, from Packard's "The Mystery of Chimney Rock" will serve to illustrate:

On p. 38, the reader, while searching for his or her mischievous cousin in a haunted house, and having been confronted by the witch who owns the place and who, in the guise of a kindly old woman, offers cheese and crackers, has chosen not to take "candy from strangers" and instead to run away. The witch then instructs her maid to block the reader's escape, but the maid rebels and denounces the witch and tries to lead the reader out of the house. At this critical junction the reader is asked to choose between immediate escape with the maid and returning to rescue his or her cousin Jane, who has been trapped in another part of the house. If the reader chooses to escape immediately, he or she finds a policeman waiting outside the house, that Jane has already escaped on her own, and that the witch has died of a heart attack and the curse on the house is thereby (somehow) lifted. On the other hand, if the reader chooses to go back and rescue Jane, he or she finds Jane waiting in the hallway and escapes together with her and the maid as before. This time, however, there is no policeman, the witch is not dead, and the cat which is the witch's familiar (or were-form) stalks them menacingly as they flee into the night, suggesting that they may not have seen the last of the curse.

Now, while one could argue about which is "the right" choice for a child in this situation, that debate misses the point altogether: Jane escapes regardless of the reader's choice to try to rescue her or not, and the only difference between the outcomes of the two choices is that in one the curse is lifted and in the other it is not. But there's not really any conceivable causal connection between the reader's choice to escape immediately or to try to rescue Jane and either of these two outcomes, which are thus basically random. The message of the medium is that one has a choice, but the message of the content is that those choices make no difference as to what actually happens, and that one might as well choose randomly. This, patently, is opposed to the spirit of the enterprise, and particularly if the point is to impress the importance of careful decision making.

But even if the goal is merely entertainment, such a disconnect between medium and content remains aesthetically offensive. To make the point, imagine the kind of extreme deterministic mockery of a CYOA book, complete with many possible choices of routes through the pages, all of which lead to exactly the same outcome by exactly the same story. The reader is offered choices and may make them, but none of them make any difference to the course of the story. And while there may be a certain amusing philosophical irony in the presentation of the illusion of choice while denying its actuality, the reader of such a book is nearly certain to feel put upon and insulted. (More amusing, perhaps, is the possibility of an anti-didactic CYOA book which, in the spirit of some of Shel Silverstein's "children's" poems, consistently rewards bad behavior and punishes good.)

These "gimmicky" approaches to the problem of a mature CYOA book may be clever and perhaps very amusing, but truly would not rise much above the level of elaborate jokes. To achieve my longstanding goal of writing a CYOA book that could succeed as serious fiction, for adults, a more fundamental strategy is required. And that, in spite of the title and direction of this essay, is to drop the second-person voice, and write in the third-, where the "rigged game" effect becomes no more of a problem than in normal non-interactive fiction. The first person may offer some interesting possibilities, as well, with the narrator acting as the reader's "agent" in the fictional world and reporting back the outcomes of his assignments. This agent would have a character all his own, and might choose to obey or ignore the reader's choices for his own reasons, or likewise to accurately or inaccurately report the outcomes of those choices.

Finally, my conclusions about the second person for serious interactive book-fiction purposes should not be taken to imply that I think second-person interactive fiction in general is a lost cause. In fact, I think quite the opposite. It is probably fair to speculate that second-person interactive fiction can succeed to the extent that it presents the reader with a realistic level of choice. Given the infinity of futures that spiral away from every instant of reality, however, I find it difficult to imagine that this goal can be achieved in the format of a book. But computer-based interactive fiction is another matter entirely. It is conceivable, indeed some would argue commonplace today, for a computerized universe to offer sufficient choice on the behalf of the "reader" at every moment to escape the impression that things cannot unfold otherwise than as they do. To do so, contemporary computerized interactive fictions turns increasingly to rule-based reality simulation and multi-user participation. It might even be argued that MMORPGs like Everquest, Second Life, and EVE constitute interactive fiction in its highest state of development to date. And there is no fundamental reason why these graphically-intensive universes could not be implemented textually, thus overcoming the reservations of those who would argue that fiction requires written language.

Operation Overkill: Blast From The Past

2007-10-09T22:48:00.000-05:00

When I was but a wee lad of 12 or 13, I was a huge dork (imagine!): glasses, braces, zits, the works. Lacking friends, I spent much of my free time fiddling with computers, which in those days meant crude graphics or just text in applications that ran from the MS-DOS command line. I loved computer adventure games, and I played many of the old Infocom text classics as well as a couple of Sierra's graphical adventure series.

But my favorite of all computer pass-times was BBSing; I had ordered a printed list of BBS numbers all over the country, arranged by area code, from the back of some magazine (probably "Popular Science") and although there were only six or so of the fifteen odd numbers listed for 214 that actually worked, I soon found that all you really needed was one good one to get started. BBSers advertise with other BBSers, and if you find your way onto one big board it's no problem to come back with dozens of active numbers from its forums.

One of the active numbers from my catalog turned out to be for a BBS which existed solely to operate, advertise, and test an online "door game" called Operation: Overkill. For those who don't know the term, "door games" were some of the first online multi-user dimensions (MUDs). In Overkill, the players coexisted in a massive virtual post-apocalyptic world represented on a series of very large maps. A player character who was not online at the moment was "camping," and if you camped in a city you were safe, but if you camped out in the open anybody who happened along could attack you, and if they won they ensuing combat, take all your stuff. Player vs. player combat was an element from the beginning. The environment was full of resources and monsters and the currency was water. The baddest of the bad guys was "Overkill" himself, and if you successfully killed him you got the baddest of all weapons (the "Devastator") and essentially had "won" the game. The entire experience was text-based, with the only hint of graphics in the ASCII- and ANSI-art splash screens that came up when the game started.

I loved that game, and its sequel, Operation: Overkill ][, with all my heart. It's been nearly 20 years since I dialed that number, but I still remember that the prefix was 669. The Overkills had been written and the BBS was operated by a bright young fellow named Dustin Nulf, and at the time I started coming around he was just making the transition from the original Overkill to Overkill ][. I played both games, using the handle Become Death, because I knew from some movie that "the man who invented the atomic bomb" (of course I had no idea of his name, nor that to describe the bomb as the invention of one man was idiotic) had supposedly said, on witnessing its fury, "I am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds." It would be many years before I would learn that this man was Robert Oppenheimer, and that he'd actually been quoting the Bhagavad Gita, rather than just making up some cold-ass shit to say to a motherfucker before he blew up his country. But it was an appropriate name, given the post-nuclear holocaust setting of Overkill, and although I got several sounds-like-a-brand-of-bug-spray type jokes at the time, I was gratified to learn, years later, that the German progressive metal band Symphorce had thought the name wicked enough to bestow on their 6th album.

As geeked out as I was about Overkill (bordering on obsessed), I ended up getting involved in a number of hare-brained projects that revolved around the game. The first and most successful was the creation of several ANSI and ASCII-art splash screens like those used in the game. At first I made some ASCII ray guns and so forth like those in the original Overkill splash art, but with the advent of OO][, which was ANSI-enabled, I moved on to ANSI-type art. My triumph was a bright red-and-orange nuclear fireball with the words OVERKILL II imposed upon it. I was proud of this creation, and bold enough to e-mail it to Dustin Nulf himself. His response was enthusiastic and encouraging; he put the fireball splash up on the game and told me to send in any more I had like it. Glowing from his praise, I went on to make a couple more screens, including one with a large black-and-yellow radiation trefoil and one featuring a two-handed ray gun in profile that was intended to be the Devastor.

On a lark, I recently went Googling to see if I could find any information about what became of Dustin Nulf and the Operations: Overkill. Somewhat to my surprise, the game still has a signficant web presence, and its own enthusiast's website at www.operationoverkill.com. Apparently there's even a web-based Overkill portal in the offing; I already set up an account there, using my old handle, and as soon as it goes live you can bet I'll be putting down Everquest 2 and EVE for awhile to revisit their humble text-based roots and my own early adolescence. Overkill is maybe the only part of it I'd ever care to remember.

More surprising, still, than finding others like myself who remembered and loved the game, was finding that my original ANSI splash art had actually survived in the collective digital memory these past twenty years, when I myself had long since lost track of it, probably discarding it in a box of ancient 5.25" floppy disks when I first moved out of my parents' house more than a decade ago. All of the bundled OO][ splash art, including three of mine, are on display here, albeit without proper accreditation and not in their original ANSI format (which modern web browsers do not display). I've uploaded the images that are mine, here, in case that site ever goes down.

Sometime soon, when I get a minute, I'm gonna find an ANSI editor that's been ported to Windows and recreate the nuclear blast image in its original format. It takes special software to look at ANSI art these days, but the principle of the thing is important to me. I might even go so far as to make myself a mosaic tabletop based on the same pattern, but probably without the words.

That might look a little weird.

Bright Moon on the Rise

2007-10-04T07:08:00.001-05:00

This post has moved. Thanks for your interest!

An Observation About Perception of Color

2007-09-14T09:35:00.000-05:00

The visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum covers the continuum of wavelengths between about 800 and about 350 nm (nanometers). In terms of energy, which is inversely proportional to wavelength, this is a progression from lesser to greater energy. And here there is an interesting disconnect between the way humans perceive color and the physical truth of the matter. School kids learn the mnemonic

R O Y G B I V

that is, the man's name, "Roy G. Biv," giving the colors of the rainbow in order from longest to shortest wavelength, which is the same as saying from lowest to highest energy. The interesting part comes from the observation that our perception of color is really circular rather than linear, more like

R O Y
V G
I B

which is supposed to represent a circle. Perhaps a real image is called for:

The important thing to note is that we don't perceive the break in energy that comes between RED and VIOLET in the physical world. On the color wheel, our perception of the difference between, say, GREEN and YELLOW, is equivalent to our perception of the difference between RED and VIOLET; in energetic terms, however, green and yellow may only differ by tens of nanometers, whereas RED and VIOLET differ by hundreds. Anywhere on the continuum between ORANGE up to INDIGO, the infinitesimal difference we perceive between any two adjacent colors is truly minimal, in terms of energy, while at some point between RED and VIOLET, on the other hand, the same infinitesimal difference of perception is actually a maximal difference of energy, at least so far as visible frequencies are concerned. Perhaps the simplest way to express it is to say that we perceive the spectrum as a circle when in terms of measurable physical parameters it is a line.

Now the real challenge: Having observed this discrepancy, what we might call a "discontinuity" of perception, can we imagine a way to exploit it in a useful invention?

My first thought: we have two colors between violet and red which are infinitesimally different, which amounts to imperceptibly different, to the human eye, yet are dramatically different in terms of energy, which electronic devices should be able to detect. So if we oscillate a signal between those two optical frequencies we should be able to transmit data in the optical range in a way that is invisible to the human eye yet readily machine-readable. So we could have a light flashing coded information that a machine could detect but which would appear to be constantly shining to the human eye. Now, what good is that?

I dunno yet. Visual radiation has the advantage that the atmosphere is generally transparent to its propagation (which is why our eyes have evolved to see it). but so do radio and lots of other invisible waves. So the key is that we want a signal that is necessarily visible for some reason, but in which machine readable information can be transmitted invisibly. What is the application?

Sony Everquest II Customer Support Nightmare

2007-07-05T15:57:00.000-05:00

A month or so ago I had to stop playing EQII, as the system stopped allowing me to log on. I believe it's a billing problem with the credit card on file but I don't know for sure because I have *never* received any communication from Sony regarding why my service was cancelled. I tried to log-in and check/update my billing info but I couldn't remember my password and had to reset it. I never received the e-mail containing the new password. I reset it several times and still never received the new one. I was told that it might be an issue with my Yahoo e-mail address; I turned off all spam filtering and message blocking to my Yahoo account and tried again, several times, and still did not receive any e-mails. I tried to resolve the issue by live chat but found that I couldn't log on without the password that I apparently couldn't receive by e-mail. I tried to create an entirely new station account so I would be able to talk to the live chat people. I did so, and when I tried to use it to log on to live chat I was told that it could not be verified and was not allowed to log on. I finally caved in and called SOE's voice number in San Diego, which is NOT an 800 number so I had to pay for it, and after navigating the voice mail system that told me repeatedly to do all the things I'd already done was finally allowed to talk to a human being. I told him the whole story and he was helpful and I spelled out my ID and e-mail over the phone and he found the account but finally refused to provide my password unless I could provide the last 4 digits of the mastercard I used to open the original account, which has expired and long since been destroyed. I don't have to provide the credit card number to reset my password online, but suddenly when I call by voice I do? And all of this because Sony seems unable to send an e-mail to my Yahoo address, in spite of the fact that I receive automated replies from other companies and services at that e-mail address constantly. In a crowning and glorious irony, I did receive an e-mail customer support satisfaction survey following my phone call. It is the first e-mail I have successfully received from Sony since the whole fracas began. Absolutely unbelievable.

Octagonal Picnic Table

2007-06-17T23:12:00.000-05:00

For her birthday this year, Dad bought Mom a beautiful cedar gazebo to go out by the pool, replacing an ugly blue canvas tent that had stood there since they'd purchased the house 6 years ago. Appointed the task to furnish it, I decided it was the perfect opportunity to construct one of the octagonal picnic tables I'd long admired, ever since first encountering one in the outdoor picnic area in front of Book People, where I used to work. I looked around on the web, and was pleased to find free plans for a very similar model available at BuildEazy.com.

Dad and I followed their plan very closely; the only change we made was to double up each table leg to enhance the symmetry of the finished design. We had to buy two additional 8-ft 2x4s to accomodate this modification. The stain we used, the same as that with which the gazebo itself had been finished, was sprayed on, and the excess wiped off with rags The project took about 20 man-hours.

LOLwargz

2007-06-11T19:14:00.001-05:00

Does Anybody Else See A Resemblance?

2007-06-04T22:51:00.000-05:00

I Knew This Kid

2007-05-31T15:14:00.001-05:00

I've been in Austin for almost a decade now. For most of that time, my favorite haunt was a campus-area punk-rock coffee shop named Mojo's Daily Grind. Owned and operated by Wade Beasley (scion of local aristocrat Roger Beasley's car dealership dynasty), who lived in rooms above the shop, Mojo's was a den of disenfranchised junkies, failed rock stars, and other countercultural wannabes. I met more than one girlfriend there, and over the years Mojo's saw me at my best and at my worst, but moreso the latter than the former. A couple of years ago Wade got fed up with the place and sold out to some dumbass frat boy with a bunch of Daddy's money who promptly fired all the help, ran off all the regulars, and tried to make the place "respectable." Of course he ran it into the ground. One or two other buyers came along and tried to save the place but the damage was done and Mojo's finally went down for the count with a massive party on New Year's Eve 2006. A bunch of the staff have opened a kind of spiritual successor called Epoch in a different location, and although I've never been there I've heard good things. But that's not the point at all.

The point here is to talk about Toby.

He showed up around the turn of the millenium, a fresh-faced young kid who surfaced among the gritty Mojo's regulars. Strikingly good-looking and baby-faced, Toby quickly became a sort of Mojo's mascot--he was always around and everybody loved him. I think he was 16 or so when he first started coming around. And for two or three years it went on that way--Toby was just a fixture, always running around, always in the background, always good for a laugh or a smart-ass remark. And that was it; I never paid too much attention to him, except perhaps to be annoyed by his easy charisma. I think the first time I spoke to him it was sharply; I was losing a game of chess against a former roommate when Toby sidled up and sat down. He said a few words to Matt, my opponent, and turned his attention to the game. It looked as though he meant to watch, and I didn't want him to. I asked him to go away, he resisted, and I got a bit meaner. I don't remember exactly what I said but I do remember his response, as Matt exploited my last lousy move to capture a rook: "You better wipe it off and play some chess, boy."

Even then it made me smile, a bit. He had spirit.

In fact, as I would eventually find out, Toby was good for quite a bit more than random snappy comebacks. If you wanted weed, Toby would hook you up. If you wanted mushrooms, Toby would hook you up. Acid? Toby knows a guy. Cocaine or speed? You bet. Heroin? Let's not get crazy now. But even then, if you were a real friend, and not just a client, Toby might be able to help you out. Suddenly it began to make sense how he could spend all his time just hanging around. Hell, Mojo's wasn't just a hangout for him--it was an office.

More than once, over the years, the Austin PD came sniffing around and the management threatened to ban Toby from the premises. But they never did, as far as I know, and if they did it never lasted very long. He eventually became more cautious, anyway, and although you could still meet up with him there to set up a deal, it would always go down somewhere else.

Bit by bit, details of Toby's life slipped out into the open: His father was an itinerant tattoo artist who lived in some other state. His mother was local but had kicked him out of the house and was not speaking to him. He had a sister, whom his mother doted on, with whom he did not communicate. He had been gang-raped as a young teenager by a bunch of hillbillies in a pickup truck. He would sometimes burn himself with cigarettes on purpose.

Besides dealing, Toby held down a job, for a while, at a local adult video store that survived from the 1970s, complete with jizz-encrusted coin-operated video booths in the back. I used to go up there and sit with him in the small hours and talk about life, the universe, and everything. He was really quite intelligent, but regrettably uneducated. That video store thing lasted until the owner figured out he was dealing from there on the side and fired him.

Toby's decline really began, in my mind, with a traumatic break-up with some hot little number who had captured his heart, and whose name I cannot rememeber for the life of me. They were together a relatively long time, all things considered, and Toby was truly in love. She left him for another man and he became consumed with hatred and jealousy. For weeks his every word was about her. He had elaborate and perverse schemes for revenge upon her, none of which, thankfully, ever came to fruition.

It was sometime later that I learned he was living on the street. He would still appear around Mojo's, but he favored it less. Instead, one might find him at any point along the stretch of Guadalupe street between 15th and 29th Austinites know as "The Drag." He seemed to always be hanging out in some doorway, rapping with the college kids and the so-called "drag-rats"--itinerant punk rockers who panhandled for money along the busy commercial sidewalks. For a while he even had a job at a video arcade, but that didn't last either. He used to steal food from various fast food establishments by claiming to be an aggrieved college kid whose order had been flubbed earlier in the day. Apparently this scheme was so successful for him that he eventually wore it out when all the restaurants in the area got wise to him.

I don't know exactly when he became addicted to heroin. He was using coke while he was working at the video store, I knew, but he claimed that he was not shooting it. The transition to needle abuse was stark and shocking. Suddenly Toby was not so fresh-faced anymore. He sported a septum piercing and went weeks without bathing or changing clothes; he looked like a GI who had spent the last month fighting guerillas deep in the jungle, and smelled worse. He was still a good looking kid and had little problem picking up a girl every now and again who would let him stay with her for a week or so, but eventually they always kicked him out. Besides the usual track marks, his skin developed streaks of carbuncles from whatever other nasty side crap was in the black tar he was shooting, sometimes together with cocaine in a suicidal cocktail called a "speedball."

I let him stay overnight in my apartment and use my shower, once, during this phase, and he gave me a small cheap plastic cross on a string given him by some church homeless outreach program. I still have it. He used my shower and slept on my floor but complained in the morning of stomach troubles, which he bitterly regretted having ruined a rare night indoors. He shot up in my bathroom, against my wishes, while I looked on anxiously to see if I was going to have to call an ambulance. In the grip of the drug, his head lolled against the countertop and he simply knelt there, nodding, for a very long time.

He had been diagnosed as schizophrenic, he told me that night, and he was paid some kind of relief check by the state but it could not come to him directly as he had no address. It went, instead, to his mother, who kept it for herself. He went through one of my stacks of magazines and traced the outlines of the models' faces with a heavy black marker; this was what he called "drawing," and he claimed that it calmed him tremendously. He said that he went once to whatever bureau was paying his disability and tried to have the checks transferred to a friend's address, but the voices in his head and in the busy office had overwhelmed him and he'd run back to safety in the street.

I never knew, for certain, how much of what he said was true. As with most homeless kids, you had to be prepared to be manipulated if you dealt with him. I was usually smart enough to spot this, and I did not let it bother me. I know that Toby liked me genuinely because I helped him without conditions and continued to treat him with respect even when he himself did not believe he deserved it. I resolved that I would let Toby scam me, if he needed to, thinking at the time that I'd rather live with having been played for a fool than with having denied aid and comfort to a person in dire need. Sometimes by whatever machinations he would procure a hotel room for a night or two, and in these cases he always called me in a celebratory mood, and I would make some excuse why I was just too busy to come hang out with him. His apperance became genuinely shocking, and I expected him to turn up dead very soon.

It was around this time, I think, that the mural was painted. Appearing on the north wall of what was then a GAP outlet on the southwest corner of Guadalupe and 24th streets, the mural, similar to an older painting at Renaissance Plaza further south along the Drag, seemed intended to represent a "slice of life" from Austin's busy street culture. There were college students with their books and sports, there were musicians with their instruments, and down in the right corner, leaning up against the frame, there was a street kid who looked EXACTLY like Toby had, before the needle changed him. I don't know if the artist knew him personally, but I rather doubt it; it was simply that Toby had become such a fixture on the Drag that he was part of its archetype. I wonder even today if the artist knew she was painting a real person.

He's still up there, immortalized as he was in his late teens, wearing baggy clothes and a sentry cap, trying to look tough in spite of the softness of his eyes and the smoothness of his skin. I walk past him every day on my way to the lab, and every time I notice him, it strikes me as fitting that the street remembers him even when most of the passersby do not. It's as if Toby's suffering burned so brightly that, like an atomic blast, it cast his shadow in the place where he lived and etched it there forever.

Toby may still be alive somewhere. The last time I heard from him he called from a motel to say that he was leaving town, and going to stay with his father. The call was interrupted halfway through when my cell phone cut out. He did not call back. I hope very much that it was true, and that he found his Dad and got straightened out. I hope that his Dad turned out to be the person Toby dreamed he would be. I hope that, whoever he is, he managed to love Toby unconditionally, and in so doing give him at least a taste of what a real family is like. I hope that Toby, himself, has hope again.

But I rather doubt it. In all likelihood, Toby is dead or in jail, and all that remains of his youthful promise is his accidental portrait on the wall of what is now a Wachovia Financial. And in the end even that, someday, will be covered over, lost beneath a thousand painted logos. When that happens, not even the street will remember him anymore. I will be the only one.

Ethyl Acetate Intoxication?

2007-05-30T13:39:00.001-05:00

Ethyl acetate is a small organic molecule used as a solvent in paints, varnishes, glues, and other consumer products. It has an intense fruity-sweet smell that can burn the nose if too strong. Notably less toxic than acetone, which it has fairly recently supplanted as the standard solvent in nail polish remover, ethyl acetate is rapidly and very completely hydrolyzed in the body to produce acetic acid and ethanol which, as my sophomore organic instructor pointed out, is like having a salad and a beer.

So given that EtOAc, as organic chemists abbreviate it, turns into vinegar and alcohol in the body, would it be safe to use as an alcohol replacement? An untaxed and unregulated source of drunkeness? As a man of age and at least modest wealth, my interest is only academic; I could get Everclear if I wanted to buy it. I'm just curious: Are there street kids somewhere who drink nail polish remover to get drunk? The one fatal case of ethyl acetate exposure I could find in the literature (For Sci Int, 154(2005) 92-95) involved a worker, standing over a tank full of it, who passed out from the fumes and fell in. His body was found at the bottom the next day, and even after pickling in the stuff overnight there was still 50 times more ethanol in his blood than there was ethyl acetate. An MSDS from a notable manufacturer of ethyl acetate lists the substance as an inhalation hazard due to the risk of anoxia (i.e. you can suffocate if there's so much EtOAc in the air you can't get oxygen) without known or expected carcinogenicity, and as safe to handle without gloves. It is flammable, of course, but then so is ethanol.

Unlike ethanol, of course, EtOAc is not infinitely soluble in water. But it is sufficiently so (about 10% by volume) to make esterwine or esterbeer that should be approximately as potent as its ethanolic counterpart. Without any rigorous studies demonstrating the safety of such a procedure, I would not like to see anyone try it as a result of reading this. But I am curious enough that I might someday try it myself using ultrapure laboratory solvent as a precaution against trace nasties.

X-Mom

2007-05-11T10:54:00.000-05:00

This is my mother, Alecia Ragan. While undergoing treatment for thyroid cancer at an advanced research facility in Dallas, Texas, she was exposed to COSMIC RAYS and developed SUPER-POWERS!

It's the truth.

Mom had thyroid cancer when I was a wee lad, and beat it, or so everyone thought. A couple of years ago it was discovered the cancer had survived. She underwent treatment with radioactive iodine at a hospital in Dallas, during which time she was sequestered in a radiation ward and we were not allowed to visit her. They had to dispose of her urine as both a biological and a radiological hazard. The treatment, though unpleasant, was successful and the cancer was beaten. A side-effect, however, was that Mom developed a hypersensitive olfactory ability--SUPER SMELL! She'd always had a pretty good sniffer, but now it's nearly supernatural.

Like all super-powers, Mom's super-sniffer has been both blessing and curse. On the one hand, she loves to cook and her new hypernose has enhanced her appreciation for the fragrant aromas involved; on the other, she couldn't sleep on her fancy expensive Tempurpedic mattress for several months after purchase because of the VOCs it outgassed; most people can't even detect this smell after a week. I certainly couldn't. Likewise, the smell of potpourri or artificial air freshener is so strong that it sickens her, and she cannot stay indoors with it. This has caused more than one embarassment at a party.

Still, in spite of the hardships fostered by her newfound ability, Mom continues to use her powers for good. Perhaps next Mother's Day I'll get her a costume.

Minimalist Accent Lamp

2007-04-06T22:30:00.000-05:00

The outlet is wired to a wall-switch, as is common in apartments and condominia. The "lamp" consists entirely of the outlet-to-socket converter from the hardware store for $1. The bulb is a low-power compact flourescent that generates lots of light but very little heat. The bottom plug can be used normally.

Cel Has One L, Dammit

2007-03-29T17:21:00.000-05:00

The 1990s saw the coining of the phrase "cellular telephone" and its inevitable contraction "cel." We all know this word: "What's your cel number?" "Call me on my cel!" "My cel's ringing; hold on."

Some perverts, however, seem to think this contracted word, when written out, should be spelled with two Ls, as "cell," having the same spelling as the word used quite broadly to indicate closed systems with distinct boundaries in biology, electricity, architecture, entomology, and aeronautics, among others. "Cell" returns 12 significant meanings at dictionary.com, whereas "cel" returns only 1, which is the noun referring to a transparent piece of celluloid used in the graphic arts, especially animation. If only for the sake of lightening the load on "cell," it makes sense to adopt "cel" to contract "cellular telephone."

But there are other reasons. "Cell" is not a contraction of any kind of longer word when used in its pre-wireless sense. When referring to the unit of biological structure or the room for containing a prisoner, we do not imply that the term we choose is aural shorthand for a longer, multisyllabic, more difficult phrase, as we do with hold-on-my-cel-is-ringing. And the natural place to contract "cellular" is at the syllable, between the Ls, as we would when breaking the word across lines on a page. Some might argue that since "cellular" is derived from "cell" we should contract "cellular" as "cell," but that misses some subtle points of etymology. "Cellular" may be derived from "cell," but when we contract "cellular telephone" we're not making the logically reverse adjective-to-noun derivation--we're just shortening a cumbersome phrase.

What's more, "cell" already has an established meaning in the field of wireless communications, viz. the geographical area covered by an individual antenna in a "cellular network."

Finally, there's the argument from Occam's razor: "cel" uses fewer letters and thus less ink and less space on the page or screen. The extra L is "done in vain," and while force of habit and concerns regarding clarity might excuse (if not justify) its presence in the traditional uses of "cell," if we're going to coin new uses for the sound we might as well spare the extra letter and emphasize both the novelty and contractive origins of the word with "cel."

The Role of Isolation in Penology Under Social Contract Theory

2007-03-12T16:19:00.000-05:00

Crudely, from the contractarian point of view, the criminal is one who has violated his obligations under the implied "contract" into which citizens enter by virtue of their participation in society. Turnabout being fair play, the obligations of society toward the criminal are likewise nullified by his violation. Now comes the humanitarian crisis: What are we to do with one whom we are no longer obliged to treat as a citizen? History provides scores of apalling answers, but I propose that which is simultaneously most effective and most humane (and most rational, from the contractarian viewpoint), which is simply imposed exclusion from society in general. Note that I do not say "polite society" or "the society of the governed" or "civilized society;" by "society in general" I intend not any particular society but society itself. I mean to say, i.e., that the proper punishment for crime is total isolation from the rest of humanity for a period of time suitable to the severity of the crime: No family, no friends, no guards, no lawyers, no other inmates. No visits, no conversations, no telephone calls, no letters, no e-mails. The cruelty of such treatment is not to be underestimated, and its value over the present penal system, which does not so much exclude the prisoner from society as introduce him to a new one, should be obvious. As a society, prisoners can adapt to the challenge of prison; all that's required for the individual is that he or she learn to play by a new set of rules. Witness here the gang phenomenon. As individuals, however, isolated prisoners are simply shunned. Their only hope for belonging is a return to proper society, and the only means to that end is reconciliation with its rules. Maintaining an environment of monkish isolation for every prisoner of course increases expense, but this could be recovered by releasing consensual criminals (i.e. those convicted of consensual crimes). Prisoners who truly do not understand what civilization requires of them are rare indeed; unwillingness, rather than ignorance, is the rule, and it should be the function of punishment to provide incentive for assimilation by promoting the need to belong.

The Literature of Spam

2007-02-26T20:27:00.000-06:00

The more I consider the huge volumes of spam that saturate the intertubes every day, and the ongoing battle between spammers and spam-fighters which drives the former to produce better algorithms for writing "realistic" human prose and the latter to produce better algorithms for identifying it, the more I believe we are approaching a literal manifestation of the old thousand-monkeys-at-a-thousand-typewriters concept. The difference is that spam-monkeys aren't just punching random keys--they're using sophisticated heuristics to write properly-constructed sentences and paragraphs that are at least grammatically meaningful. One of these days, simply by the law of probability, one of them really is going to produce the complete works of William Shakespeare, or something equally profound. The irony is that no one may ever read it because some super-advanced spam-filter somewhere will recognize it as spam an delete it. Hell, it may already have happened.

Can it be very long before we start receiving meaningful e-mails right out of the ether? Could spam be the basis of a whole new species of poetry or literature? A kind of oracle? The voice of the global brain? Are the snippets of prose and poems tacked onto the ends of those penny-stock scams and viagra ads the infantile babbling of a developing consciousness? It would be an irony worthy of Phillip Dick if it turned out to be advertising that ultimately drove our machines to learn to think and speak for themselves

Best Spam Ever

2007-02-26T20:14:00.000-06:00

"Viagra Soft Tabs will give you the wings of the eagle."

My Starrior

2007-02-20T02:04:00.000-06:00

I was digging through my toy chest the other day, looking for a spare TV remote, and I chanced upon a number of toys preserved from my childhood and, until that moment, forgotten. It was quite the trip down memory lane.

When I was around ten I loved Starriors, which were a line of plastic robot toys produced by Tomy, which, in retrospect, were remarkably prescient of Lego's Bionicle. The franchise featured a somewhat-before-its-time storyline about a post-apocalyptic Earth in which two "races" of machines--"Destructors" and "Protectors"--vie for control of the planet. According to legend, both races were created by Man and left behind when he forsook the Earth's surface, the Protectors to salvage, reconstruct, and protect the natural environment, and the Destructors to eliminate nasty mutants and aliens and other out-of-control beasties. In Man's absence, the Destructors have taken over, enslaving the protectors and trying to blot out the memory of Man so they can rule without obligations. The Protectors keep the faith and do what they can to bring about the rebirth of Man, who is said to be concealed in hibernation in an ancient battle station. Most of the Starrior toys featured a tiny silver humanoid "pilot" figure apparently "riding" in the head which, in the story, was known as a "control chip." These contained the essence of each Starrior--his or her robosoul, if you will. Supposedly the chips were shaped by Man in his image so that the Starriors would never forget their obligations to their Creator. Although the mini-comics that came with the toys were somewhat ambivalent on this point, if the control chips were scale replicas of human beings then the Starriors themselves were giant mecha by our standards.

In proper collect-them-all spirit, the packaging inserts listed all the available toys in the franchise, and I owned every one that was sold in the US, including the super-cool Armored Battle Station playset, for which I worked odd jobs to earn the necessary $20. The toys were not all released at once, with at least two "generations" appearing months apart and two particular toys, I recall vividly, never coming to market at all. These two were humanoid-type Starriors (known as "Wastors") whose names were Flashfist and Bolar. Flashfist was a Protector and Bolar was a Destructor. They were listed and pictured in the packaging materials but never sold, a fact which frustrated me to no end. I even wrote a letter to Tomy asking when they would be released. I got some sort of canned response, as I recall.

One of the many cool things about the toys, in my opinion, was that the bits were interchangable. One could swap heads and arms and torsos and legs back and forth among the Wastors, and some of the other parts from the non-humanoid varieties. In truth there were few aesthetically satisfying combinations, however, as the colors from different toys tended to clash garishly and thus cause the hybrids to look exactly like what they were--bits and pieces of other toys stuck together. I experimented with lots of permutations before I discovered the red-and-black guy pictured below. I know I gave him a name, but I can't now remember what it was. I do remember that I loved him intensely, and that I obsessed over him in a way that probably wasn't healthy. I carried him around with me everywhere and would lose track of time staring at him from every angle, admiring the way all the bits fit together and complimented each other and considering myself pretty clever for having dreamed him up. He has the legs of Slaughter Steelgrave (the Destructor leader), the torso of Slice (a 2nd-gen Wastor with wind-up arm-weapon), and the arms and head of Saw-tooth (a 1st-gen Wastor with wind-up chest-weapon).

I remember quite clearly, when I was 11 or 12 years old, swearing to myself that when I grew old I would not put aside my toys and would continue to play with Starriors. They brought me so much happiness that I could not then bear the thought that I might ever part with them. In the end, of course, I did put them aside. They were dumped into a plastic barrel that lived in the attic of my parents' house until I went off to college, and subsequently donated to charity when they moved out of that house. Only my little custom guy survived, and as an adult that seems right to me. Now, as a grown-up, I understand that the magic I experienced with these toys was not in the toys at all--it was in my head. And that's why it's right that the only one still with me is the one I made.

I Have Very Bad Posture

2007-02-16T00:40:00.002-06:00

I realized while meditating this evening that I tend to hold my shoulders up and forward. The guided progressive relaxation I use includes the instructions that the hands should lay "alongside the body, with the palms open toward the ceiling." This position has always felt uncomfortable to me; my natural inclination has been to lie with my palms down against the bed. This is the position that feels most "relaxed" for me. When I tried to do it as instructed, I felt my arms uncomfortably twisted in a way that became downright infuriating after 45 minutes of motionless contemplation.

Tonight, in something of a breakthrough, I realized why. Rolling my shoulders in tends to bias my arms toward the palms-down position. If I really relax and stretch the muscles in my chest and put my scapulae flat against the bed, it becomes quite natural and comfortable to lie with my palms open to the ceiling, to say nothing of how it improves my experience of my chest and upper back. I have a barrel chest which, at least as an adolescent, looked pretty strange with my spindly limbs and neck, and I imagine the habit of pulling my shoulders forward was an unconscious effort to minimize this. It's a habit that might also date to my bodybuilding days, as pulling the shoulders back tends to flatten and minimize the pecs whereas pulling them forward tends to bulge and emphasize the pecs, which, I am somewhat ashamed to admit, is something I once wanted to do.

I should think about ways to correct my habit, which I believe is both a lifting and a rounding of my shoulders. My father once told me (and now I wonder if he had an ulterior motive at the time) that he had corrected his own shoulder-rounding problem by having someone affix a piece of surgical tape across his upper back between his shoulder blades when they were in the proper position. Then if he started to pull them forward he would feel resistance and tightening in the tape and would be reminded to leave them back.

If I had somebody around here to apply the tape, I might just try that.

God Bless Bob Solomon and His Memory

2007-02-15T21:34:00.000-06:00

He was the greatest professor I have ever known, and I've known a lot of them. I've just now heard of his passing this January.

I remember a physics class once, and the Russian professor was describing his reaction to textbook merchants touting the features of their latest, umpteenth, feature-packed editions.

"If you really want to make it great," he would say to them, "Make it cost five dollars."

Well, Bob Solomon did just that. I don't know how long he taught his existentialism class, but he compiled the little eponymous blue textbook for it, and it did cost $5, and it's one of the best damn books I've ever owned. Those lectures have been immortalized by The Teaching Company, and are available for sale as CDs or tapes. I can't recommend them enough.

I remember in a lecture about Kierkegaard, Dr. Solomon drew a tiny stick figure at the bottom of the board, and next to it, towering over it, an enormous circle that one first assumes is going to be a planet. Then he draws a pupil and an iris and the circle becomes a cyclopean eye, staring down at the little man like a bug beneath a microscope.

"This," he said, "is how Kierkegaard saw his relationship with God."

It still makes me laugh.

When we read Camus, he talked about the sense of hopelessness as a doctor might describe an interesting pathology. "Everything you do," he said, "becomes pointless if you think about it long enough. Even teaching. Every teacher has had the experience of a pupil who returns years later brimming with gratitude, and after talking to them for awhile, of realizing that they have completely and utterly missed the point."

I never got to know Bob as well as I should have. I had the best grade in a class of 60 when I took his course, and the way was open for me. But I was too intimidated and I failed to establish a relationship with him. I asked for a meeting with him to write me a letter of recommendation for law school. He agreed, and then stood me up. He must've thought I'd missed the point, too. And at that time maybe I had.

But I quit law school. I never should have gone in the first place. I like to think that if I'd gone back and talked to Dr. Solomon, before he died, he would have been proud of me for realizing on my own that the world has too many damn lawyers in it, already. I like to think that, in the end, I didn't miss the point at all.

Goodbye, Bob.

The Lemon Mushroom

2007-02-04T13:25:00.000-06:00

Several years ago my mother bought a potted lemon tree and kept it out on the back porch. One day, she was surprised to notice a ripe, yellow, new-fallen lemon lying in the dirt in the pot. There were some small lemons growing on the tree, but they were green and much smaller than the one that had fallen, and that night when I was over for dinner she mentioned it to me.

Curious, I went outside to investigate the prodigious lemon. I squatted down to examine it, then poked a finger at it, and only then did I realize that I was looking at the cap of a mushroom and not a real lemon. Regrettably, I did not have the presence of mind to take a picture. The resemblence was truly uncanny. The photo I've included here gives an idea, perhaps, of how this mushroom, which is lepiota lutea, could be mistaken for a lemon in terms of color and general shape, but the one I saw in the flowerpot that morning was much more convincing.

At the time, I was astounded, convinced this was a deliberate evolutionary strategy by the mushroom--growing at the bases of trees and mimicking fallen fruit in order to trick herbivores into eating them and thus spreading the spores in their stool. As it turns out, lepiota lutea is commonly known as the "yellow houseplant mushroom" because it commonly turns up in all kinds of potted plants, for some reason. So expert opinion is against my hypothesis which, as the old Time-Life Books commercial used to say, is "dismissed as coincidence." But part of me still wants to believe.

Numbers 6 - Deliberate? Coincidence?

2007-02-03T19:11:00.000-06:00

The ultimate costume pair for that hypergeeky couples Halloween party.

The Counterjihad

2007-02-02T09:51:00.000-06:00

Take all US troops out of Iraq and move them into Iran. The resulting power void in Iraq will leave the factions squabbling amongst themselves for control, and Iran will be too busy trying (and failing) to resist the US invasion to influence the process. Topple the Iranian government, destroy the infrastructure and all vestiges of WMD technology, administer free elections, and be done with it. At that point either bring the troops home or send them back to Iraq to knock over whatever maniac has seized power there in our absence, if he was not legitimately elected. Repeat the Iran-Iraq shuffle as necessary, until both nations get the point: We will not abide blind hatred and intolerance masquerading under the banner of religion, and especially not as a means of organizing a state.

If the Iraq debacle has proven anything, it's that we're really, really good at knocking over petty dictators and really lousy at installing democracies in their wake. So why not stick to what we do best? Knock 'em over and leave their nations to sort out their new governments for themselves. You can bet that whoever comes afterward will be, if not exactly grateful to, then at least respectful of US power.

Hexanol Fermentation

2007-01-31T11:03:00.000-06:00

Breed yeasts to produce hexanol, rather than ethanol

In conventional fermentation, yeasts turn sugars into ethanol. Ethanol, as everyone knows, is promising as an alternative fuel. The problem is that yeasts die at concentrations higher than about 10% ethanol by weight, and so the fermentation process can at best produce alcohol that is 90% water. Obviously, this "beer" cannot be burned as fuel, and the excess water must be removed somehow, by distillation or adsorbtion, which adds a significant energy cost to each unit alcohol produced. At the earth's equator, solar energy can be relied upon to make up this energy cost. At the more extreme latitudes, that's not necessarily the case.

Ethanol is not the only alcohol produced in fermentation. Higher alcohols such as butyl, amyl, isoamyl, and 1-hexyl are also produced, albeit in trace concentrations. As a fuel alcohol, 1-hexanol has a lot going for it compared to ethanol. Firstly, it's much "greasier" than ethanol, having a thrice-longer hydrocarbon tail, and thus will handle and burn much more like the hydrocarbon fuels we're already using. Second and most importantly, however, unlike ethanol, 1-hexanol is *not* infinitely soluble in water, meaning that at some concentration the fuel and the water will simply phase-separate. Now, instead of having to spend energy to dry the alcohol, you just tap it straight out of the bioreactor at burnable concentrations.

The only reason we're not doing this already is that (known) yeasts don't produce useful concentrations of 1-hexanol. But because they're microorganisms and they reproduce rapidly and in huge numbers it's not inconceivable that they could be bred to do so. What's needed is a rapid, colorimetric, quantitative assay for hexanol concentration so that thousands of individual yeast cultures can be rapidly screened in high-throughput equipment like plate readers. Without such an assay, chromatography of some sort is required, slowing the process of screening down by many orders of magnitude. With the right indicator, though, it would be possible to screen yeast cultures almost as fast as they could be selected and grown. A rate of 10000 generations per year is entirely reasonable. Note that 10000 generations is approximately the same "distance" that separates homo sapiens from neanderthals.

The Passing of Two Trees

2007-01-26T22:47:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I'm walking home from school and I look up to see some strange guy in a hard hat at the far end of the block waving at me with his arm. I look around for a minute and see that there's some kind of construction going on and I realize he wants me to cross to the other side of the street. So I do. But it miffs me a bit, because I dislike it when anyone assumes authority over me that's not clearly theirs.

As I get near my condo, at 2529 Rio Grande, I realize what's going on: They're knocking down trees, and not little ones either. Just inside the stone wall which is all that remains of the seedy block of furnished apartments that used to occupy the lot immediately north of my building, stood these two proud 40-ft. oak trees, just to either side of the main gate. I don't know how old they might have been, but I bet they predated the complex that was demolished around them. The workers have to clear the sidewalks because the branches are large and heavy and overhang them to some extent.

Now, I don't know if it was because I was already a bit grumpy with these guys, or solely because I was offended at the casual destruction of the beautiful old trees in my neighborhood, but I decided I was going to make a hard time for these workers, if possible, and in the best situation maybe stop them from killing the trees. I'm not such a radical (or maybe brave) person as to strap myself to one of the trunks, and it didn't really look like there would be time to make it to the hardware store and buy chain and a padlock for that purpose before they were finished, anyway.

So I did the only thing I knew to do, which was call the city. I know Austin has fairly tough municipal regulations regarding the felling of trees inside the city limits. I thought maybe I could at least verify that they had a permit to cut down these trees and get them stopped or at least fined if they didn't. The woman who answered the city information line was confused by my request at first: "There's a tree you want to cut down?" she said. "No," I explained, "I'm concerned that I'm witnessing the illegal felling of a protected tree." There was a pause, and then she said, "Hold on, I'll have to ask about that one." So I get the hold muzak, which is an impossibly banal counterpoint to the scene of arboreal slaughter outside my window. While I'm waiting on hold, the destruction of the first tree is completed and the excavator starts filling in the hole left by the torn-out roots.

Eventually the woman returns to the phone, and it's clear that she now understands and appreciates my situation. "You need to speak to the City Arborist," she tells me, and gives his name (which I never figured out how to spell, and hence will not include here), and his number, which is 512-974-1876. "I'm sorry it took so long for me to figure that out," she says. I tell her it's OK, and she thanks me for calling. It's obvious at this point that she's on my side.

I call the Arborist and get his answering machine. The excavator is now rumbling toward the second tree. I leave a rambling message about who and where I am and how they sure are beautiful trees and I just wanna make sure the workers are within their legal rights cutting them down. I am conflicted. A large part of me wants to go down and confront the workers, but I realize that will only make them defensive and will not stop them from doing what they're doing. I pace back and forth for awhile and figure the only thing to do is take pictures so I can make sure they get punished if it turns out they're breaking the law. So I snap a frame or two and turn back to the computer to work.

There's a loud CRACK a minute or two later and I go back to the window and see that the excavator has broken a large limb off the second tree. About then the phone rings, and it's the arborist, who, to my pleasure, sounds concerned and gets right to the point: "Tell me what you're seeing," he says. And I do. As I'm talking, the excavator repositions itself and strikes downward into the tree's crotch, splitting the trunk, and I realize that there's no stopping them at this point. I tell the arborist as much. "But I took pictures," I explain, "in case it turns out that what they've done is illegal."

"Where are you again?" he asks. "West Campus," I tell him. "Do you know the neighborhood?" He doesn't. "Do you have an address?" Apparently he's got a database of some sort that lists permit-holders. I don't know the exact address, but I can extrapolate from mine and take a guess: "Try 2601." A minute later he comes back and says, "Yes, there's a permit to develop that property," which I understand from his disappointed tone to mean that there's nothing to be done. Apparently the rule in Austin is that private homeowners need a permit to fell any tree with a diameter of 19 inches or greater, but that developers have more flexibility. The arborist can't tell me what the specific site plan calls for with respect to these particular trees, but he can tell me that there is a plan and it's been approved, so in all likelihood these guys are acting in accordance with it and hence within the bounds of law. I thank him and he thanks me, and before we hang up he asks me to call again any time I'm suspicious of tree-related crime, because his office depends almost completely on concerned citizens/nosy neighbors like me to catch and prevent the illegal destruction of trees. I assure him that I will.

And that's where the story peters out. I wanted to do something but I didn't, basically, and although I got some sympathetic voices on the phone none of it changes the basic fact of the matter, which is that there are now two muddy holes in the ground where there were once two live, beautiful, healthy trees. And I stood to one side and watched as a man with a machine tore them up. Should I have tried, physically, to intervene? Should I have obeyed that impulse to chain myself to the trunk? I don't know the spirit of a tree, but I know how hard it was to watch them be destroyed. It was like a crime was happening out on the street, in broad daylight, and everyone was just walking by indifferently. I didn't want to be the apathetic one; I wanted to be the one who gave a shit. But I tried to be a civilized adult about the whole thing and now I regret it. Even if I hadn't, ultimately, saved those particular trees, a show of strength might've brought some attention to the subject, might've made the developers or the city authorities or whoever think twice the next time they decided to hire out that kind of a dirty job. But in the end I was just like everyone else: Too busy with my own concerns to take hours out of my day to worry about something as simple as the killing of a tree.

Medicine Mosaics

2007-01-25T11:26:00.000-06:00

This is a mosaic made from various pills--vitamins, OTC, and prescription medications--presented to me by my beautiful and talented friend Jennifer. This medium is under-used, in my opinion. This example from a catalog background is the only other real instance I know of. This mosaic of Rush Limbaugh executed in prescription pain-pills exists as an image only; it was never really assembled.

The Abuse of Fire in Warfare

2007-01-24T10:40:00.000-06:00

What follows is in response to an article on the use of white phosphorus (WP) by US marines during the siege of Fallujah that appeared in the North County Times.

As a chemist, I find the debate about WP as a "chemical weapon" sort of amusing. One might as well claim that we're engaged in "chemical warfare" because the lead we use to make bullets is toxic.

It's like that question they ask me sometimes at the post office: "Does your package contain any chemicals?" Well, OF COURSE IT DOES, because the universe is made of chemicals and if there's any damn thing at all in the package, there's chemicals in it. In that sense, any weapon that EXISTS is a "chemical weapon," and the word becomes totally useless. The chemistry of WP is simply oxidation/combustion, which is the same chemistry that propels bullets and shells down gun barrels and causes fire in general, and the use of fire in warfare is as old as warfare itself. It just so happens that WP burns very hot and is self-igniting in air.

If "chemical weapons" is to remain a useable term, it's best reserved for toxic compounds which are employed primarily to exploit their toxicology.

That being said, it seems likely to me that in the future, as war continues to be "humanized," we will begin to see moral and eventually legal proscription of the use of burning as a means of offensive war. Destruction of uninhabited materiel or facilities is one thing, but the deliberate destruction of live human beings by combustion is pretty appalling. Think of the little Vietnamese napalm girl, or the fire-bombing of Dresden or Tokyo, or of the use of the flamethrower in trench warfare. Burning is agonizing, indiscriminate, and not terribly efficient versus shooting or blasting to bits. Burning is a frightening way to die (or, perhaps worse, to not die), and for this reason it is frequently employed as a psychological weapon.

I'm not necessarily advocating its regulation, because I think war is just nasty and efforts to "soften" it are hypocritical, but I can see it coming in the future anyway.

WoTD: "Catastrophize"

2007-01-22T09:43:00.000-06:00

Essentially, to "catastrophize" is to overreact in a negative way to a setback, such as the one who is stood up for a date and becomes upset that he or she will never find love. Broadly, catastrophization is a habit of mind that's commonly identified in the anxious and depressed. I don't know enough to speculate about what causes the formation of such a habit, but I can admit to recognizing it in myself. I have often characterized my depression as "an inability to control negative thoughts," and by these negative thoughts I essentially mean overwhelming catastrophization. When I'm depressed, even the smallest and most innocous event or impression can become symbolic of my total failure as a human being.

Recognizing the process as a habit, as something that can be lost or changed or replaced like any other habit, is itself very valuable to me. Even the simple fact that there exists a word to describe the phenomenon brings me considerable comfort--in the first place, it shows that I'm not alone in experiencing it, and in the second, well...everyone knows that to name a thing is to have power over it. The next time I begin to "catastrophize," the word itself will occur to me, and in matching the sign to the signified I will be reminded that the catastrophe I perceive is in my head and not in the world. Maybe, in time, I'll even be able to laugh about it, to find some humor in the extent to which I can blow things out of proportion, but of course there's a fine line to be walked here. I can already hear myself thinking: "I'm catastrophizing again. It's so like me to do that. No wonder I'm a such a TOTALLY WORTHLESS LOSER."

As in learning to meditate, the trick to changing habits of mind like catastrophization is probably to avoid trying too hard. Instead of recognizing catastrophic thoughts and working really hard to stop, it's probably better to just recognize those thoughts, release them, and then casually replace them with something else. Those three Rs could become a mantra: Recognize your negative habits, Release them in the moment, and Replace them with something more constructive. Perhaps there's even a fourth R: Repeat the process until they change.

Maybe Not Too Little, But Probably Too Late

2007-01-21T13:54:00.000-06:00

This week my father preserved for me a series of editorials from the Wall Street Journal by Charles Murray, of The Bell Curve fame, arguing his thesis for the reality of g, which he identifies as an inherent and inherited "intelligence factor" that differentiates the smart from the dumb. Distribution of g in the population follows a normal, or "bell," curve, and he points up many of the oft-touted depressing statistics of U.S. public education and explains them--convincingly, in my view--in terms of the normal statistical distribution of intelligence in our population. He revives the spectre of the IQ score, and although he acknowledges quibbles about the accuracy of the tools used to measure it, he also advocates its phenomenological legitimacy. He deals summarily with Gardner's multiple intelligences theory, citing relatively convincing evidence that g is a real phenomenon and can't be wished away by egalitarian reformers. He recognizes how the notion of uneven distribution of g chafes agains our ideals of equality and the political difficulties attendant to making policy decisions based on a worldview which is in this sense elitist.

I see Murray as one of a small but growing vocal minority of intellectuals who are prepared to acknowledge that human beings are in most meaningful ways determined by their genes. As biology and neurobiology advance, we come to understand more and more how even very complex human behaviors can be predicted genetically. This is certainly not the first time in history that a deterministic elitist movement has surfaced, but it may well prove to be the first time that the unpleasant awareness of genetic determinism is answered by an ethical technical solution. Before long, it seems obvious to any scientifically-informed observer, biochemistry will allow human beings to achieve meaningful control of their genetic destinies, at which point a political battle will ensue between the forces that advocate non-intervention in genetic fate and those who recognize biochemical eugenics as an escape from determinism.

Brief meditation on human nature leads me to predict that the battle will be a short one. Voices in favor of accepting determinism--such as Murray, et. al.--run up against the ubiquitous phenomenological fact of choice: Whether it is real or not, human beings experience a process of decision making that causes them to behave as if they have some measure of control over their fates. Although most rational adults can be persuaded to admit, if pressured, that there are things in life over which they have no control, most of them would also prefer that it not be so. If offered a choice between the certainty of a brilliant and beautiful and happy child and the luck of the draw, which of us would leave it to fate?

Practical eugenetic technology is not with us now, and may well not materialize until twenty years hence. Even if it takes that long, however, it still seems likely that we will find ourselves living with a technology that can correct our genes before we find ourselves living in a political culture prepared to accept that they determine our fates. In that most probable case, Murray's arguments, though convincing, come too late on the scene. Even if we begin now to implement the policy regime he advocates, it's likely that by the time reforms come into place the biology on which they are founded will become subject to the same socioeconomic pressures which corrupt the system now. Western culture has lived in denial of biological determinism for decades now, and in resentment of it for millenia--are we going now to give in and accept it on the very eve of our liberation? Better now to begin preparing for that future culture of eugenetic control, to begin steering now toward's Keillor's Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average, and away from Huxley's Brave New World, where minds are manufactured to meet the demands of industry.

Another Fracking BSG Neologism

2007-01-18T10:24:00.000-06:00

I propose the prefix "cylo-" to describe all matters pertaining to "cylon biology," in other words that "cylo-" be used analogously to "bio-" to describe any subject pertaining to cylon biology rather than normal human biology. The show, after all, has established that cylon biology ("cylology," under my new system), although generally indistinguishable from human biology at the macro-level, is chemically distinct. Which explains how Dr. Baltar can build a cylon detector and how cylons, though histologically identical to humans, can exhibit all the unique characteristics that they do, i.e. running for days without tiring, spinal bioluminescence, group consciousness, unusual RF susceptibility, etc. Thus "cylo-" can be assumed to denote that aspect of cylon physiology which is analogous to, but not identical with, human physiology.

Which gives us all kinds of great new words like "cylogenetic," "cylochemistry," "cylological," "cylonic," "cylosphere," "cylome," "cylophysics," and my personal favorite, "cylohazard."

In honor of this last term, I've made up a "cylohazard symbol," which is derived from the analogous human biohazard symbol, differing in that it is based on a five-fold axis of radial symmetry, instead of a three-fold axis. This decision is in keeping with the established significance of the pentagon and the nested pentagon as a symbol of cylon hegemony in both the old and the new Battlestar Galactica series. Material which is infectious of cylons, such as samples of the "cylon plague" from Season 3, would rightly bear the cylohazard symbol, regardless of whether or not it was also infectious of humans. Material which is infectious of both species should properly bear both symbols.

Someday I might write a pseudoepistolary "ANSI standard" from the BSG universe describing the layout and appropriate use of the cylohazard symbol by itself or in conjunction with the biohazard, chemohazard, and or radiological hazard signs.

The Swerve Test

2007-01-13T19:33:00.000-06:00

There is a road that begins, in my heart. with the general disdain I feel for most specimens of homo sapiens, and ends, in my spleen, with the blackest hate that one man can feel for another, the kind of hate most people, including myself, are fortunate enough never to experience, the kind reserved for a villain who has destroyed a loved one and witnessed by actions of murderous revenge. Arrayed along this road, like Burma-Shave ads on the highway to Abilene, are signposts, behaviors, that mark the boundaries between the states of disdain and dislike, dislike and loathing, loathing and hate.

It is somewhere around Wichita Falls, by my reckoning, that the countries of true hate begin. In mapping these infernal regions, I have found it useful to apply what I call "the sweve test," which is really a pair of tests: Driving along, I mount a rise to discover the person of my enemy, standing in the road a short distance ahead, and put to myself the question, "Do I swerve to avoid him?" If the answer is yes, then he has not yet passed into the territory of loathing; if no, then the second test must be applied: Mounting a second rise, I discover the person of my enemy standing beside the road a short distance ahead, and put to myself the question, "Do I swerve to hit him?" If no, he is loathed; if yes, hated.

The swerve test has much to recommend it. First, it is accurate: In the best tradition of Skinner, it avoids murky subjectivity by addressing only behavior. While my own estimation of the extent of my distaste for a particular person may vary with the weather, the proximity of my next meal or the quality of my last, or whether or not I remembered to take my medication that morning, the volition to actually effect his destruction, either passively or actively, is much less mutable.

Second, the swerve test is precise: We may imagine the swerve as a kind of behavioristic quantum--the smallest act measurable as evidence of intent. Here is a heavy mass, moving with great speed, having tremendous inertia, and by a small motion of my hand I can deflect its course and thereby choose to spare or destroy my enemy. In the first test, I must expend this minimum effort to save him, and in the second, to destroy him. The two outcomes differ only by a quantum.

Third and finally, the results of the test are easy to interpet: At the end of the day, the subject of the swerve test, like Schrodinger's cat, is either alive or dead.

Virtual Earth 2.0

2007-01-11T10:35:00.000-06:00

I'm imagining a portable device that integrates a global-positioning system (GPS) receiver with a short range (say 25m) LIDAR (laser imaging detection and ranging) system that could be used to map the street-level topography of the earth--buildings, rooms, trees, streetsigns--as the user moves through it. I'm imagining a built-in-panoramic video camera that can be used to map textures onto all the surfaces. I'm imagining an internal hard-drive and/or cellular modem so that all this mapping information can be uploaded, sooner or later, to a central server that compiles location-mapping correlation data from multiple users to create an immersive 3D simulation of the real surface of the earth. I'm imagining stores and businesses and schools having sales, conducting meetings, and teaching classes at virtual locations inside the virtual earth at the same time they happen in the real earth, or even in lieu thereof. I'm imagining mappers competing to be the first to scan the inside of Kitum cave, or the top of Mt. Everest, or the basement of the Pentagon. I'm imagining that we'll see it happen within 15 years. I'm imagining that the first people to make it work are going to be very, very rich.

Restlessness...

2006-12-25T19:36:00.000-06:00

for 48 hours or so, now. Nothing fascinates me; the greatest curiosity I can achieve is a kind of abstract Orwellian intellectuality: We're all doomed, and I can express the sentiment with excellent prose. I find myself straining to visualize a blueprint or a mechanical drawing of some revolutionary object which is just barely beyond my powers. I have fantasies of inventing bold new weapons, based on heretofor unknown principles of science, by an act of profoundly original innovation, of the type which only naive laymen and children are really capable: A new route, perhaps, to a fusion bomb, without the use of a fission primary--a garage-scale process unlocking megatons, realized secretly by Einstein, hinted at by Oppenheimer, and ruthlessly suppressed by history. The hardware store thermonuclear bomb. A manipulation of plywood and foam rubber that creates momentary access to new dimensions. Necronomignosis. When it finally comes to me I will have relief, and the world will tremble.

A Spartacus Moment

2006-12-24T15:15:00.000-06:00

This holiday season found me stretched out in front of the giant TV at my parents' house watching Stanley Kubrick's first movie Spartacus, a fictionalization of the Third Servile War of 73 BC with Kirk Douglas in the eponymous lead, on cable one evening. As I drifted in and out of consciousness, I was reminded of the last time I saw the movie, which was 17 years ago, at Westwood Junior High, in my Freshman Latin class. I cannot for the life of me remember the teacher's name, but although I disliked her at the time, looking back as an adult I recall her as a patient and diligent instructor.

We watched the movie, Spartacus, in her class, including the famous climactic scene in which the defeated slave army refuses to identify their leader to the conquering Romans in exchange for leniency and, as a consequence, is crucified en masse along the Appian Way.

Some days later, Ms. What's-Her-Name was conjugating verbs on the chalkboard, with her back to the class, while my friend Lee, who sat beside and slightly ahead of me, was practicing spinning, tossing, and juggling his pen a la David Letterman. The pen slipped out of his control and flew toward the chalkboard, impacting just beside the teacher and falling into the chalk-tray. She picked the pen up, turned slowly, and presented it to the class.

"Who threw this?" she asked quietly.

There was a long pause, pregnant at least with triplets. Lee squirmed in his seat.

"I'm Spartacus!" I cried, suddenly.

A wicked grin spread across Lee's face. A second later, he echoed, "I'm Spartacus!"

"I'm Spartacus!" called an unknown voice from the back of the room.

And then the whole class joined in: "I'm Spartacus! I'm Spartacus! I'm Spartacus!"

She was beaten, and she knew it. Her anger melted into an amusement she tried, unsuccessfully, to conceal from us, and class went on with a wonderful feeling of light good humor.

It is one of my fondest memories from that otherwise-traumatic period of my life.

My Favorite Ceiling Fan Design

2006-12-23T16:38:00.000-06:00

I like the no-BS minimalism of the 3-bladed unit. It lacks ridiculous brass details, does not use materials in a superficial way, and achieves a cool modern look without the ridiculous "modern" price tag. You can buy one of these for as little as $25 online.

Devilnition Definition

2006-12-23T15:02:00.000-06:00

In honor of Ambrose Bierce's subversive lexicon The Devil's Dictionary, I hereby coin the word "devilnition" as follows:

devilnition - n. a verbal definition, in the style of a dictionary entry, which imparts a subversive, ironic, or humorous meaning to the defined word, e.g. "Scientist - An intellectual who distracts himself from depressing contemplation of insoluble philosophical problems by meticulous attention to inconsequential physical ones."

In Case You Ever Wondered...

2006-12-23T14:50:00.000-06:00

...this is what a nerve-gas bomb looks like. These pictures, taken from an eBay auction, are three views of an aluminum cluster bomb submunition, of U.S. manufacture, intended to contain and disperse Sarin nerve gas. The U.S. no longer openly manufactures or maintains a nerve gas arsenal (and is actively engaged in the destruction of existing stockpiles). This object antedates the modern policy, which was established, I believe, in 1975. The seller assured it clean and safe to handle. It sold for $163.00.

Spray Paint Can Design Gaffe

2006-12-23T14:42:00.000-06:00

The little lip at the top of the spray can and the little indentation in which the nozzle is set catch paint from the spray. On extended spraying, it pools there and begins to slosh out and drip onto the floor. If the top of the spray can were a smooth curve without this lip and indentation, the can would work much better.

Obligated to Configurate - How Ironical

2006-12-23T14:28:00.000-06:00

So, it turns out, at least according to www.dictionary.com, that "configurate" actually is a word, but its meaning is essentially indistinguishable from "configure," and it costs one more syllable and two more letters. William Safire could probably give a name to this phenomenon, but it's notable also in the cases of "obligated" versus "obliged" (where the savings is a more impressive 2 syllables for 2 letters), and in that of "ironical" versus "ironic" (again 2 and 1).

Tempur-Pedic Assvertising

2006-12-17T14:56:00.000-06:00

As much as I love my Tempur-Pedic pillow, and as much as I pine for one of their full-size memory foam mattresses, I can't help but make fun of the fact that theirs is surely the only successful international corporate logotype to predominantly feature an ass-crack.

A Postmodern Primer in Orwellian Prose

2006-12-11T13:59:00.000-06:00

Several years ago I undertook to update George Orwell's classic maxims of clear prose, from his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, to better reflect modern sensibilities.

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or figure of speech which has been run into the ground.

2. Never employ a polysyllabic construction where a monosyllabic construction will suffice.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always be sure to cut that word right out of there.

4. The passive is never to be used when the active is possible.

5. Never use patois, neologisms, or argot if you can think of everyday English equivalents.

6. Any of these heuristics should be disregarded, if, in the course of putting them through their paces, respectively, one is impelled to commit unpardonable stylistic faux pas.

Rudolph the Sh*t-Faced Reindeer

2006-12-11T13:47:00.000-06:00

You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen,
Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen.
But do you recall
The most tragic reindeer of all?

Rudolph the sh*t-faced reindeer (Reindeer)
Had a very ruddy nose. (Like a crabapple!)
And if you ever saw it, (saw it)
You would say his drinking shows. (Like Bukowski!)

All of the other reindeer (reindeer)
Call him names behind his back, (Like degenerate!)
So Rudolph the sh*t-faced reindeer, (reindeer)
Crawls inside a fifth of Jack. (As in Daniels!)

Then one hazy Christmas morn,
Santa intervened: (Oh, no, no)
"Rudolph, you have wrecked your life:
You crashed my sleigh and it killed your wife."

Now the reindeer take turns driving (driving)
Rudolph every other day (Even Saturdays!)
To meetings of a 12-step program (Al-Anon!)
At the local YMCA. (Like where Daddy goes!)

Quack Whore

2006-12-05T16:07:00.001-06:00

The 4-Course Submarine Sandwich

2006-12-04T23:29:00.001-06:00

The original idea of the sandwich was to produce a meal which could be consumed tidily without utensils, perhaps while engaged in some other activity. But why sacrifice quality? Why not take the original concept to its logical conclusion and put a 4-course meal on a sandwich? Exploit the spatially linear form of a submarine sandwich to mimic the temporally linear form of a multi-course meal. The sandwich becomes biased along its length, with one end clearly indicated as the starting end, which contains ingredients evocative of a soup course. As you eat along the sandwich, the soup ingredients give way to salad, and then to meat, and finally to dessert. Obviously, planning the dishes to compliment one another is important here, even moreso than in a traditional multi-course meal.

Freezing Water by Fast Hydrostatic Decompression

2006-12-01T11:09:00.000-06:00

It's my understanding that freezing water fast enough to prevent crystallization and its negative effects on biological systems is a classical probem in cryobiology and cryonics. A more mundane application is food preservation, where flash-freezing has demonstrable advantages over slow freezing.

It makes sense that water is slow to freeze, because it has such large thermal mass. In a body of water of any appreciable size, the time it takes to conduct heat away from the central regions to the periphery is significant. There are inherent limits to the speed at which heat can be conducted out of a body of water. Freezing water by lowering its temperature is, obviously, limited by the speed at which you can move heat away, and the larger the body of water the slower that speed becomes.

But there's another way to freeze water. Consider the phase diagram for water here. The line from point M to point O represents the boundary between liquid and solid phases, and is either the freezing line or the melting line depending on which side you start from. Water is fairly unique among materials in that this line has a negative slope; among other things, this is an expanation for why ice is less dense than liquid water. For my purpose, please notice that at higher pressures the freezing point of water is lower than at ambient and lower pressures.

I propose to freeze water by first compressing it, so that its freezing point is lowered. Then it is cooled to a temperature below its freezing point at normal pressure. Because the elevated pressure will keep it in liquid form, it does not matter how fast the temperature is lowered, because the phase transition will be held off. Then, once it's cooled to, say, -5C, you rapidly release the hydrostatic pressure and the liquid, now under ambient conditions and well below its freezing point, should solidify very rapidly. Unlike temperature, the hydrostatic pressure of a liquid can be varied essentially instantaneously throughout its volume.

I read now here that this technique is actually in use to freeze food products. I haven't yet discovered if it has been applied to cryobiological problems, however. It's generally referred to as "Pressure Shift Freezing."

Schlegel Diagrams

2006-11-29T00:51:00.000-06:00

These beautiful Lewis structures are essentially 2-dimensional projections of Buckminsterfullerene (C60)--buckyballs flattened out. They represent the same molecule, but from different perspectives, one centered on a hexagonal face and one on a pentagonal face. I just think they're pretty. Might even make nice tattoo motifs, if one were inclined towards ultra-dorky chemistry tattoos. There are other Schlegel diagrams representing the higher fullerenes, but they are not so pretty as these, IMO.

Fluorohydrofullerenes?

2006-11-27T10:10:00.000-06:00

Even educated non-scientists know about fullerenes, the novel allotropes of elemental carbon resembling soccer balls or geodesic domes. C60, a spherical structure containing 60 carbon atoms, is the archetype. Each carbon atom in a classical fullerene is sp² hybridized, meaning essentially that it is bound to three other atoms arranged more-or-less in a plane with it. A carbon atom is said to be "saturated" if it has four bonds (sp³ hybridization), and any carbon with less than four--like those in fullerene structures--is said to be "unsaturated" because it could, at least in terms of classical valence bond theory, accept at least one more bond. These are the same "saturated" and "unsaturated" that gives us the terms "saturated fat" and "unsaturated fat." The chemistry to take an unsaturated carbon to a saturated one is rudimentary and is practiced every day on vast industrial scales.

So I'm driving along the other day and it occurs to me that fullerenes are unsaturated--they're just carbon. Could we dump them in a reactor with hydrogen and a metal catalyst, just like we do with the vegetable oil that ends up in your oreo cookie filling, and produce the saturated hydrocarbon equivalents of fullerenes? Hydrofullerenes? So I went to the library and, per Hirsch and Brettreich's excellent book Fullerenes, found out that the short answer is "Yes, but not exhaustively." While partially-hydrogenated fullerenes like C60H36 can be produced and are relatively stable, exhaustive hydrogenation has not been achieved and is probably impossible, at least under practical conditions. This is believed to be a consequence of steric crowding on the exterior of the carbon shell; the more positively-charged protons you stick on to it, after a point, the less stable it gets.

The next-most intuitive question, at least for me, is "How about fluoridation?" The realization that flourine atoms can be treated analogously to hydrogen atoms in hydrocarbon chemistry gave us Teflon and the whole modern field of fluorocarbon chemistry. So if we can't make perhydrofullerenes, how about their perfluoro analogs? A sort of "Teflon sphere" idea? Turns out, again per Hirsch and Brettreich, that the answer is "No." Again, while partially-fluorinated fullerenes can be and have been produced, perfluorination turns out to be unfavorable for reasons which are analogous to those which disfavor perhydrogenation. The only difference is a sign change: While the surface of perhydrofullerene is too positively charged to be stable under practical conditions, the surface of perfluorofullerene is too negatively charged to be stable under practical conditions.

So my hare-brained idea is this: Try to fully saturate C60 using a "hetero-fluoro-hydro" strategy, so that the complimentary positive and negative partial charges of protons and fluorine atoms on the sphere's surface stabilize the structure. You could either hydrogenate and then fluoridate, or fluoridate and then hydrogenate. My intuition favors the latter, because while it's known that fluorine will displace hydrogen, the opposite reaction does not occur, to my knowledge.

I'm not an expert in the field by any means but I've done some rudimentary literature searches using phrases like "hydrofluorofullerene," "fluorohydrofullere," etc. and not found any precedent.

As to benefit, who knows? My readings to date indicate that fully saturated fullerenes of any type have been produced only in trace quantities, if at all. It would be a significant achievement to produce saturated fullerene in significant yield. Then you study its properties and start to think applications. If nothing else, being the first to make lots of saturated C60 could be good for one's scientific career.

The point has been made that the fullerenes and fullerene type structures are highly stable. They are even more stable, in fact, than carbon in its adamantane geometry (i.e. diamond), because the sp² hybridization of the carbon atoms in fullerenes allows for an enormous amount of resonance stabilization when the double bond electrons delocalize through the enormous pi-system. (Which is what makes them conductive.) This is something I glossed over earlier in discussing the energy costs of saturating fullerenes, when I only mentioned steric repulsion at the surface. If you saturate a fullerene, you're also breaking a very large resonance stabilization. This is why, as some have suggested, it appears to be feasible to exhaustively perfluoridate diamond surfaces--adamantane carbon is sp³. But it is not safe to assume that because diamond can be perfluoridated, so can fullerenes, again because diamond is not resonance stabilized and fullerenes are.

The hetero-fluoro-hydro strategy I propose might offset the steric costs of saturation with complimentary electrostatic interactions on the surface, but I don't think it'll help much with the resonance-breaking problem. However, because the studies I've seen suggest that it's really not too hard to at least partially saturate C60, my intuition is that the steric problem is much more significant than the resonance-breaking problem. After all, the first double bond should be the hardest to break, because it will have the most extended resonance and hence the most stabilization. And since they've already made it to C60H36 by conventional hydrogenation techniques, it follows that sterics are the limiting factor, not resonance.

Peroxidation appears to be a workable strategy, c.f. Chemical Physics Letters 384 (2004) 283-287. Tsukuda and co-workers demonstrate convincingly that they can produce C60On with n <= 30 by corona discharge ionization. Again, it hasn't been done in quantity, but Hirsch and Brettreich seem to think it could be. The paper includes a really cool figure showing C60O30. I would also note that traditional "wet" metal catalytic epoxidation has been tried many ways, and they can't seem to get more than 6 oxygen atoms installed.

An Amarillo Armadillo

2006-11-25T23:31:00.000-06:00

Maybe the folks who live in Amarillo, Texas, aren't really so proud of the fact that their city means "yellow" in Spanish. If I were on the city council, however, I think I'd want to embrace the fact, and move to make Arty here the city mascot.

On rumination, however, it occurs to me that there are at least three reasons why such a move is unlikely. I've already mentioned one, which is the association of yellow with cowardice. The second reason, as has been pointed out to me elsewhere, is that an animal that curls into a ball or runs away when threatened only worsens the implications. Finally, there's the fact that public admission of the Spanish origin of the city's name is likely to be unpopular given the present political climate in Texas--especially rural Texas--regarding Mexican influence in American culture.

GPOV

2006-11-24T19:29:00.000-06:00

My girlfriend, like so many of the really smart people I know, is something of an insomniac. It's understood between us that she is free to use my computer, watch my TV, eat out of my kitchen, read my books, and generally make herself at home during her sleepless small hours at my condominium. Often I find endearing bits of evidence of her vigils during the daylight hours--a DVD left in the player, a book out of place, an empty cracker box in the kitchen trash. Last week I woke up one morning and found that she'd left Google Earth open on my desktop. The search queue immediately caught my attention, as the top three entries were "Auschwitz," "Buchenwald," and "Dachau." I had to ask her about this later.
"Why," I put to her, "were you looking at satellite pictures of concentration camps in the middle of the night?"
"Oh," she replied, with complete nonchalance. "I wanted to see what they looked like from God's point of view."

On The Possibility of a "Heat Pill"

2006-11-20T16:11:00.000-06:00

It was suggested on halfbakery.com that a pill could be created that would generate a comfortable heat in a person's gut. These are my thoughts on the subject.

The first problem is going to be finding a reaction that is sufficiently exothermic that the amount of stuff we can pack into a pill will give off the necessary heat. Obviously, the reaction should have no toxic or gaseous products. We might call this the "thermodynamic" part of the problem.

To give an idea of how much heat we need, let's adopt drinking a cup of hot tea as a model system. An 8 oz cup of hot tea at a "comfortable drinking temperature" of 65C contains 8 oz = 237 mL of water at 65 C - 37 C = 28 C above body temperature. The heat required to elevate 237 mL of water by 28 C is (237mL)(28C)(1 cal/CmL) = 6636 calories, or about 7 Kcal.

Dry calcium chloride (CaCl2) gives off about 18 Kcal/mol when dissolved in water. Dividing the required heat by the heat of solution of CaCl2 gives us (7 Kcal)/(18 Kcal/mol) = 0.39 moles of CaCl2 that we must dissolve to give off 7 Kcal. Unfortunately, the molar mass of CaCl2 is 111 g/mol, so 0.39 moles of it weighs 43 grams! With a density for CaCl2 of 2.15 g/mL, we're left with 20 mL of dry salt that we must consume. Even though the solution products are the harmless and physiologically ubiquitous ions Ca2+ and Cl-, the consumption of this much salt is bound to produce a strongly hypertonic solution in the gut, which will almost certainly cause dehydration and diahhrea.

A better candidate is calcium oxide (CaO), also known as quicklime. Although the hydration of calcium oxide is slightly less exothermic than that of calcium chloride at 15.5 Kcal/mol, it also has a significantly lower molar mass of 55 g/mol, meaning we can pack more reactivity into the same mass. It has higher density, too. What's more, besides heat, hydration of calcium oxide produces calcium hydroxide (CaOH2), a medium-strong base that will react exothermically with bile acid (HCl) to give off even more heat, water, and *hydrolyzed* calcium chloride (i.e. we're not going to get any more heat out of CaCl2 at this point).

Assuming that the biggest horse-pill we can swallow is 3 mL, multiplying by CaO's density of 3.35 g/mL gives us about 10g of CaO that we can reasonably ingest in a single pill. 10g CaO is 0.18 moles, so the hydration step alone should produce (0.18 moles)(15.5 Kcal/mol) = 2.8 Kcal. What's more, each mole of Ca(OH)2 is 2-normal in hydroxide, so we end up with 0.36 moles of base. Acid neutralization of hydroxide liberates 13.7 Kcal/mol as a rule, so we can expect an additional (0.36 mol)(13.7 Kcal/mol) = 4.9 Kcal from the acid-base chemistry. Summing contributions from hydration and neutralization of CaO gives us 2.8 Kcal + 4.9 Kcal = 7.7 Kcal given off by our 10g quicklime pill. From a strictly thermodynamic point of view, we could actually afford to make our horse-pill a bit smaller. Incidentally, the hydration of quicklime is, I believe, the same reaction that is used to heat MREs.

So it looks like we've solved the first part of the problem. We've found a reaction with the necessary energy density that is without toxic or gaseous byproducts. We're still basically eating a salt pill and have to contend with the expected consequences of that, but we haven't produced any particular substance that's going to poison us. The problem now is one of kinetics, i.e. it has to do with how fast things happen. The hydration and neutralization of quicklime in the stomach are going to happen lickety-split fast, and so we're essentially going to get all 7 Kcal dumped into the gut over the course of a few seconds. This will probably produce sufficient local heating to generate steam. What we need is a sustained release (SR) formulation for our pill that will prevent all of it from reacting at once.

More insight can be had from our model system. Although I've never tried it myself, my guess is that, while 65C may be a comfortable "sipping" temperature for hot tea, a person who took a whole cup at that temperature and slammed it down his or her throat all at once, which is approximately the same effect our pill would have, wouldn't be very happy or very comfortable. This, of course, is not how people drink hot beverages. It takes minutes to drink a cup of hot tea, during which time it probably cools considerably. To get a realistic idea of how much heat we actually absorb from a cup of hot tea, and how long it takes us to do it, it would be necessary to measure the temperature time-course of a real cup of tea as it is being consumed and integrate to get the area under the curve. This would not be a difficult experiment. Once we knew the absolute heat absorbed from a real hot beverage, we could adjust the absolute energy goal for our pill accordingly. More importantly, once we knew how long it takes to comfortably drink that beverage, we'd know the time-course over which our pill was expected to give off its energy. This information, in turn, would determine the composition of our SR formulation.

SR formulation entails a slowly-dissolving matrix which releases the active ingredient into the gut at a measured rate. This matrix, unfortunately, is going to add mass and volume to an already ungainly pill. Because we don't need a particularly long-lasting SR formulation, however, it's probably possible to keep the volume gain as low as 100%, i.e. we can probably safely assume that SR formulation will no more than double the volume of the pill. If we then half our target heat, so that one pill equals about half-a-cup of tea, we've both solved the pill-size problem and provided a more versatile dosing system: One pill for light warmth, two for full strength, and three for extra strength.

This is an interesting inquiry both because it is fairly easy to model and because it suggests a couple of simple experiments. The first, mentioned above, involves measuring the real heat absorbed by a real body from a real cup of hot tea, and the second, readily implied, is to pack 10g of quicklime into one or more gelcaps, dump them in an unstirred container of 0.1N HCl, and see what happens to the temperature and other observables.

He of Pants Unsuitable

2006-11-14T20:42:00.000-06:00

Several years ago I designed a couple of chess sets, and among the feedback I received there was an e-mail from a gentleman named Ray, who also made chess sets and had, in fact, won some awards for his "themed" chess sets, which included a set made from various makes and sizes of fire hydrants. Ray was an interesting guy; during the course of our correspondence, I learned that he was about 50, that he lived with or near his mother, and that he'd served in Vietnam. He was single, and one of the last times I heard from him he'd taken off around the world to meet a Russian mail-order bride he'd been conversing with via e-mail. He got as far as Paris, as I recall, before chickening out. He sent a long group e-mail to myself and others of his friends describing the journey in lavish and sometimes eccentric detail. As an example of the latter, I recall a confrontation he described between himself and an airline employee at the Denver airport in which he was told that his "pants were not suitable for flying." His e-mail did not include a description of the pants in question, leaving the nature of their unsuitability for us to imagine. The incident is described in passing, as Ray's experience of the Denver airport was simply in passing, but I found the phrase evocative and it has since become one of my favorite idioms: "His pants are not suitable for flying" has, in my mind, approximately the same meaning as "his elevator does not go all the way to the top" and "he's one card short of a full deck." I say "approximately" because, while the latter expressions clearly imply lunacy characteried by deficiency, of one sort or another, "his pants are not suitable for flying" seems to lack this perjorative connotation. One whose pants are not suitable for flying is crazy in an entirely benign way; as long as there are responsible personnel to remind him to change them before boarding an aircraft, no harm can come of him.

A Subtle Kindness

2006-11-14T01:45:00.001-06:00

I knew I liked Dr. M_______ the second week I was in the Chemistry department. I was riding the elevator up from the basement. It stopped at the ground floor and a college-age male with some kind of neurodegenerative disease rolled onto the elevator in his wheelchair, together with a woman who was obviously there to assist him. The doors closed, and at the next floor Dr. M_______ got on. The kid in the wheelchair was parked right in front of the buttons. Without missing a beat, and with a slightly impatient tone, Dr. M_______ says "Five, please." "Sure," the kid replies amiably, and reaches out a trembling, scrawny arm and, with some difficulty, presses the button for five. Nobody said anything for the rest of the ride up, but you could feel both the kid and his assistant, who might've been a sister, flush with gratitude. Most people, in that situation, they look at the kid and feel like they can't ask anything of him, so maybe they nod politely and smile awkwardly while they reach around him to press the button for themselves. Dr. M_______ saw, in the second between the time the elevator doors opened and the time he stepped on, how rarely this kid would find himself in a situation--ANY situation--in which HE could be the one helping out, instead of the one asking for help. He saw an opportunity to make the kid feel like a normal person, and he took it, without being patronizing, without trying to politely tippy-toe around the glaring fact of the kid's handicap, and without second-guessing himself. He saw all that, and he did it, and he never once let on that he knew what he was doing. But he did, and everybody on that elevator knew he did, and every one of us, including me, had a brief glimpse of authentic human kindness. From that moment on I knew he was someone I wanted to know better.

Memphis, Tennessee

2006-11-13T20:05:00.000-06:00

Recorded in 1959 and released as the B-side of "Back in the USA," Chuck Berry's song "Memphis, Tennessee" was not an immediate hit in the US, but would creep as high as #6 on the British pop charts in 1960(?). Although diametrically opposed in tone, the song's story foreshadows Berry's 1965 hit "Promised Land" (covered by Elvis in 1973) with its protagonist negotiating a cross-country long-distance phone call with the operator. In "Promised Land," the narrator's tone is jubilant and triumphant, but in "Memphis, Tennessee" it is somber and morose. "Memphis" is the story of a young man returning a long-distance call to a girl named "Marie," who lives in Memphis, "on the south side/high up on a ridge/just a half-a-mile from the Mississippi bridge," with whom the narrator had been emotionally involved, and subsequently separated "because her Mom did not agree." The songs plays with listeners' expectations; based on the typical content of pop songs from that era, most people automatically assume that the narrator is a young man, just starting out in the world, who remembers Marie as an early sweetheart, perhaps from his teenage years, with whom he was forced to part because of her mother's disapproval. The last line of the song, however, turns our expectations on their heads:

"Marie is only six years old. Information, please: try to put me through to her in Memphis, Tennessee."

The song so effectively misleads us that this line commonly horrifies first-time listeners--he was involved with a six-year-old girl? On repeated listening, however, we realize that the idea of a romantic or sexual involvement between the narrator and Marie is never stated, and come to understand that Marie is not the narrator's former sweetheart, but his child. The "Mom" mentioned in the lyrics is not a tyrannical mother-in-law figure, but the narrator's ex-wife, who "tore apart our happy home in Memphis, Tennessee" not by meddling, but by divorcing the narrator and maintaining custody of their daughter, Marie. And so in one line the song gains a tremendous gravity, transmogrifying from an adolescent paen to puppy love (which is what most other pop songs of the era actually were) into a much more serious lament of a much more mature situation. A young man (and he must be young, for how else could his sweetheart's *mother* effectively exert control over their relationship?) who loses a sweetheart is consolable--he has a long life ahead of him and should be able to find another. An older man who has missed the formative early years of his daughter's life due to an acrimonious divorce is not so quick to find solace, and his is a situation that most grown men, regardless of age, could at least relate to (if not actually identify with.)

Coming as it did in 1959, this one key line in this one particular song anticipated, in its affect, the metamorphosis of Rock 'n' Roll itself from children's music to adult fare, a process which would not be well underway until the advent of Cream in the late '60s. That the song was released as a B-side and did not find widespread acceptance until covered by Lonnie Mack in 1963 is perhaps, at least in part, due to the anachronism of its theme. Rock 'n' Roll audiences were younger, then, and not ready for the emotional weight of a subject as serious as divorce and the pangs of fatherhood. With its incestuous blurring of the line between mother and lover, the song, of course, is ripe fodder for Freudian analysis, and especially given the pedophiliac tone of some of Berry's other songs (e.g. "Sweet Little Sixteen") and the sex scandals that rocked his career ("C'mon, baby, just let me pee on you!") the way is clearly open for disappointing moralistic interpretations of "Memphis, Tennessee." Such tawdry readings miss the more profound meanings of the song and of its position in cultural space.

The Sweet Science

2006-10-16T20:55:00.000-05:00

It has been theorized that part of the appeal of boxing is grounded in the homoerotic tension that seems to underly so many hypermasculine behaviors: Two hypervirile men enter the ring and pound on each other until one of them literally cannot continue. Then, if it's been a good fight (i.e. if Tyson wasn't involved), they hug each other and cry like sobbing sisters. That's the real pay-off, getting to show their soft sides and have them appreciated by the world without having to seem like a pair of sissies. All that's required is that they nearly beat each other to death first.

Science has an analogous process. From the very beginnings of scientific education, the objective nature of the discipline--the non-self-ness--is emphasized to all students. The style of written science (the passive voice) is deliberately chosen to eliminate personhood, and is often explained with words to the effect of, "we don't care WHO made the measurement, just that it was made and was such-and-so." For this reason, scientists can be notoriously bad at giving credit where credit is due. It's not that they're all glory-grabbing assholes who want to steal others' work; just that they've spent their adult lives steeped in a culture that doesn't care who made the measurement, only that it was made and that it was such-and-so.

But sometimes, after a long and illustrious career that includes the luck and determination to be associated with a major discovery, an individual scientist achieves the crowning glory of a Nobel prize. At this point--and the culture of science is very clear about this--he or she is suddenly allowed to be a human being again. I have before me a commemorative article in Chemical & Engineering news ("C&E," as it's known in the trades), published as a cover story on the occassion of the one-year anniversary of Nobel laureate Richard Smalley's death. Pp. 14-15 include a gray topbar spread cleverly titled "HUMAN ELEMENT" which, without excusing itself, describes Richard Smalley the person, in emotional terms. Because he spent his life negating his personhood through science, on the occasion of his apotheosis and death it is appropriate that his personhood be emphasized. This is the rational scientist community's chance to revel in the emotions that we spend most of the rest of our time trying to supress, eliminate, and control for.

Maybe science is for man-vs-world what boxing is for man-vs-man; a kind of ultimate theatre of conflict. As in any conflict, premiums are placed on strength, willpower, and determination--on denial of the "baser" urges that lead us to sleep until noon and massage our data and and give up if the math gets too hard. It's as if we acknowledge the certain pathological quality that one needs to achieve greatness as a scientist. We recognize it and acknowledge that it must have great personal costs, but because it is of such great value to society it is nonetheless condoned and encouraged in the young.

Auspicious File Extensions

2006-09-26T10:24:00.000-05:00

I got to wondering whether anyone had been bold enough to adopt .GOD for some proprietary file format. Turns out, according to the folks over at filext.com, there was once an Australian outfit called "Games on Demand" that used .godd to denote something called an "Arena Partial Downloaded Game" file, which is not so very exciting. Note that they opt for the four-letter extension with the extra terminal "D" to avoid potential blasphemy. Games on Demand is apparently no more, so maybe they paid the price anyway. The last few lines of Revelation tend to suggest that the Almighty is pretty touchy about his IP.

Which got me thinking about other provocative three-letter homonyms that might make amusing file extensions. SEX, for instance, has more than one usage: Alpha Software uses it to denote something called an "Alpha five set index," and there's at least one report that some Urban Chaos game files use the carnal extension.

.EAT, interestingly, appears to be unexploited. So, too, .DUG, .LOW, and .YAK. It's kind of an amusing game to brainstorm applications that might use such extensions...

A Scientist Watches the Evening News

2006-05-10T05:35:00.000-05:00

I do not really believe in a cabal of conspirators sitting around a table beneath an eye-and-pyramid in a basement in Geneva any more than Descartes really believed that an Evil Genius had his brain trapped in a jar, but I think Descartes had the right idea in positing this paranoia as the only basis for a truly rational epistemology. We do not assume the worst is true, but we exercise maximum skepticism by imagining the worst and asking, "How do we know it isn't true?" The idea, for instance, that 9/11 was really the work of powerful behind-the-scenes forces who wanted to effect certain changes in the American political system and/or the world economy, and not demonic terrorists, deserves to be examined rationally. Although my personal belief is that things happened more-or-less as the mainstream media has presented them to us, I see that belief as irrelevant to the question of knowledge. I don't know what really happened on 9/11 any more than you do, and it is almost certain that neither of us ever will. We are wise, then, to withhold judgement idefinitely, and especially to avoid making important decisions based on judgements we might otherwise be tempted to make. Politicians are not citizens in a court of law and should be presumed guilty until proven innocent, for the same reasons that a man who stands to lose his life or his freedom as punishment for a crime should benefit from the opposite presumption, and that is, that it is better to err on the side of caution. For me, for now (and probably forever), 9/11 was a tragedy on par with an earthquake, a hurricane, or a tsunami: Certainly we would prefer that it never happened, but there is no one to blame for it but God.

The Moussaoui Verdict

2006-05-04T13:44:00.003-05:00

So I'm completely in a tither about the outcome of the Moussaoui trial. I am on the one hand pleased that they decided not to execute him, and on the other fairly vexed that the whole country--even the judge who sentenced him--seems to regard this as some kind of failure. I'm apalled by the fact that people across the nation seem to be comforting themselves with the thought that he's going to spend the rest of his life in supermax custody, which is by many accounts a fate worse than death. There were jeers in one editorial to the effect of "he'll rot in a cell before he burns in Hell." Shame on all of us.

To cap it off, there have been noises about how he's going to be denied even the 5 monthly non-contact visits afforded to other prisoners in this most extreme manifestation of solitary confinement, although I really don't see how they're going to get that one by the ACLU. The sentencing judge wagged her finger at him and said he would never get to speak publicly again, but that seems incredibly naive to me as I really doubt they're going to be able to hold him completely incommunicado, in which case lines from his letters and/or interviews will (probably sooner rather than later) find their way into various "true crime" and other exploitative books, copies of which will probably end up in the Library of Congress for indefinite historical preservation on the federal dollar. I would also point out to the scolding judge that, although most people in the English-speaking world today know Moussaoui's name, very few of those same people could produce hers if they were offered money to do so.

I really wish the media had paid more attention to exactly what crimes he was convicted of, rather than focusing almost exclusively on the outrageous things he said and did in the courtroom. The impression I get is that he was mostly convicted of vocally supporting Osama bin Laden, the 9/11 attacks, and Islamic jihad in general which, as distasteful as it may be to most of us, is not a crime. Considering that he was actually in federal custody as the 9/11 attacks took place, it would seem that the worst they could possibly get him on would be conspiracy, and although there's a long legal tradition of taking conspiracy very seriously I have had a problem with it since law school. Conspiracy is a charge that's relatively difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt (especially when, as in this case, the defendent wants you to believe he was involved) and relatively easy to trump up with courtroom theatrics and propaganda (again, much easier when the accused does his best to help you out). Although the federal prosecutors have produced long lists of Moussaoui's alleged crimes and he was obviously found guilty on some particular charge, we all know, deep down, that his was mostly a show trial. 9/11 happened, the people most directly responsible for it died in the act, Osama bin Laden slipped through our fingers, and the Iraq war proved to be about something else altogether: SOMEBODY STILL OWES US AN EYE! So it's politically expedient to barbecue this guy who's obliquely connected and who, guess what, wants to be a martyr anyway, so why don't we give him his chance?

Well, they had to try somebody for it, right?

Right?

Resident Evil 4

2006-04-26T21:07:00.000-05:00

In 1983, when I was but a tot of eight, a new videogame appeared at the arcade ("Tilt," it was called) in the local shopping mall. This was in the days of the Atari 2600, when the arcade experience was still emphatically superior to that of home-console players. The new game, "Dragon's Lair," offered a radically different approach than other games on the market at the time, which were almost entirely sprite-based. The stand-up cabinet housed an early laserdisc player, and the game featured full-motion animated video, giving it a look which was light years ahead of its competitors like "Centipede" and "Defender." In today's terminology, "Dragons Lair" was all "cut scenes." Gameplay was miserably poor, however: It amounted to moving the joystick in a particular direction at a particular time in the video, thus affecting the "action" of the game and determining which video clip would play next. As in a choose-your-own adventure book, making the wrong choice would lead to death. UNLIKE a choose-your-own-adventure book, there were no instructions; you had to guess, based on what was happening onscreen, which direction to move the joystick and exactly when. The superior graphics (which even now is often the standard by which all videogames are judged, rather than playability) justified its 50-cents-a-game pricetag when ALL the other games were just a quarter. In fact, now that I think about it "Dragon's Lair," may well be the first 50-cent arcade game I ever saw. I played it once or twice but quickly recognized it as a rip-off. Choose-your-own adventure videos, thankfully, did *not* take off in the market, and "Dragon's Lair" was relegated to the domain of historical curiosity.

Until today! The dunderheads at Capcom have included the concept in the latest installment of their highly-successful Resident Evil franchise. On the whole, RE 4 is a pretty good game. The atmosphere is appropriately 'orrifying throughout. Also, the game looks spectacular - better than any other console game I've seen - and the playability of the shoot-em-up stuff is not bad at all. The environment has some good "actions" built into it, which can induce some impressively cinematic spontaneous gameplay. Now, instead of just blasting everything in sight when the "zombies" attack, you can run into an empty building, push a dresser in front of the door, run upstairs, and knock down the ladder that the zombies are using to climb up and get you *while they're climbing.* Then you can toss a grenade down on them and watch the parts splatter. The PlayStation 2 version of the game even supports progressive-scan video, so if you have the right connectors and a good display you can enjoy all this action in high resolution. The various weapons available to the male lead, Leon, are satisfyingly powerful and effective, and there's plenty of the oh-my-god-I-can't-believe-this-new-gun excitement. Plus, once you've played the game all the way through you can go back and play parts of it again as a different (female) character with different weapons and moves, which is a hallmark of the RE series and a clever way to recycle all those environments the designers put so much thought into.

But it's a long way from perfect. The storyline and dialogue are *feeble* to say the least, and although the angry villagers and other beasties that attack you throughout the game aren't technically zombies (they're hosts of mind-controlling parasites), you tend to end up thinking of them as such anyway. It's easy to identify the game's various cultural influences: the parasites look exactly like facehuggers from the "Alien" movies, and the beseiged-in-a-farmhouse-by-zombies motif of the early chapters is clearly evocative of "Night of the Living Dead." The girl, Ashley, whom you're supposedly rescuing and who follows you around all the time, falls in and out of the clutches of the bad guys so many times you rapidly stop caring. The random scruffy vagabond "merchants" that inexplicably inhabit the enemy compound to sell you state-of-the-art weaponry (but no ammunition) during slow spots in the game stretch the credibility of the storyline well past the breaking point (to say nothing of the random "shooting ranges" that you can practice at from time to time). None of the puzzles are in the least bit difficult. The bosses, while requiring a good balance of arcade and puzzle-solving skills, are entirely predictable. If I have to watch one more "nightmarish transformation" of a humanoid badguy into some kind of polytentacled arachnid whose only weak spot is its eyes, I'm going to laugh myself silly.

But the absolute worst part of the game are the random choose-your-own-adventure cut scenes. Those habituated to "resting" during video game cut scenes are in for a rude shock: RE 4 demands that you *closely* watch the action of the cut scenes, because every so often you're faced with a "Press B quick or die!" scenario. No matter how carefully you play during the shoot-'em-up portions of the game, these *BOO!* scenes are almost certain to take you by surprise, the first time, and flush all your hard work down the drain. They're easy to clear when you know when and where they're coming, of course, so including them just seems like a mean way to randomly kill the player his or her first time through the game. It's almost as if somebody at Capcom got annoyed with the thought of people not watching their (insipid) cut scenes, and therefore designed them with built-in pop quizzes. The final jet-ski chase out of the exploding cavern is a particularly annoying instance of this. It's easier to kill the final boss than it is to successfully navigate the caverns on the jet-ski without being killed, which of course breaks the tempo of the game's final moments in a very frustrating way.

Still, I enjoyed RE4 enough to play it all the way through, at least the first time. Faced with the prospect of starting over as the female character, I find myself less than enthusiastic, although I'll probably play the new chapters through anyway so I can see all of her available weapons, which promise to be much cooler than Leon's, at which point my opinion of the game may have to be revised somewhat. I'll let you know. But until then, RE4 gets an emphatic "eh."

Do-It-Yourself Supercritical Fluid Extraction (DIY SFE)

2006-03-06T11:17:00.000-06:00

So I've been fascinated with supercritical fluid extraction ever since the idea was first mentioned by Dr . VandenBout in my general chemistry class some four years ago. For the uninitiated, a supercritical fluid is a substance heated and compressed above its so-called "critical point," which is a coordinate on the pressure-temperature plane above and to the right of which the distinction between liquid and gas becomes meaningless. Theoretically, any substance can be made into a supercritical fluid, but of course some substances have more accessible supercritical domains than others. Carbon dioxide, for example, is the most commonly-used and -studied supercritical fluid because its critical pressure and temperature are accessible with relatively inexpensive apparatus.

The neat thing about supercritical fluids is that their capacity to solvate particular organic molecules can be tuned very selectively by precise adjustments of temperature and pressure. So they make useful solvents for industrial processes. In the case of CO2, an added "green" benefit is that the supercritical solvent is entirely benign, environmentally. Ever since I first learned about supercritical fluid extraction, I've been interested in the possibility of constructing a "garage-scale" supercritical fluid reactor. After doing some light reading on the subject in my old instrumental analysis book, I realized that, if a suitable pressure vessel could be found, performing supercritical fluid extraction of, say, natural products or pharmaceuticals could be readily conducted by the average shmoe in his garage using widely available materials. It is not even necessary to purchase or rent a high-pressure CO2 cylinder, as grocery-store dry ice can serve as the CO2 source, and can be conveniently measured out in the solid phase by weight or even volume. Simple calculations using the ideal gas equation give particular volumes and weights of dry ice to achieve particular pressures at particular temperatures. The dry ice is simply loaded into the pressure vessel, along with the material to be extracted, before sealing. The spreadsheet below gives all necessary physical constants and the results for an 8-quart pressure vessel:

DIY SCF Calculations
PV = nRT

SCP(CO2): 100 bar / 98.69233 atm / 1450.377 psi

SCT(CO2): 40 C / 313.15 K

Ves.Vol.: 8 qt / 7.570824 L

R 8.21E-02 L atm mol-1 K-1

MW(CO2): 44.01 g/mol

d(CO2[s]): 1.6 g cm-3

n=PV/RT

n = 29.08 mol => 1279.7 g => 799.8 mL

The big problem turns out to be the pressure vessel. My first thought was that a high-end kitchen pressure cooker might do the trick. NOT SO. A "high pressure" in the world of pressure cooking is 15 psi overpressure, which is about 2 atm. To access the supercritical fluid domain for CO2 requires nearly 50 times that pressure. A pressure cooker would explode (messily) long before the necessary pressure could be achieved. What's more, that pressure needs to be dynamically maintained. To recover solutes by supercritical fluid extraction, the SCF itself is slowly bled from the reactor and bubbled through an appropriate solvent, e.g. methanol. The CO2 blows off into the atmosphere and the goodies remain behind in solution. The reactor, however, needs to be designed to maintain constant pressure during this slow bleeding of the SCF. On a garage scale, this might be achieved by steadily elevating the vessel's temperature to compensate for bubbled-off SCF, but what effects the temperature ramp may have on substrate solubility are unknown to me. In "professional" SCF reactors, constant pressure is maintained by employing a syringe-type pressure mechanism in which reactor volume is continuously decreased during the extraction. Even if the "temperature ramp" method proposed above proved workable, the development of a useful garage-scale technique would still await the discovery or invention of a suitably accessible pressure vessel.

Despair

2006-01-15T06:52:00.001-06:00

Perhaps 15 minutes ago I awoke from another dream featuring characters and scenes from my adolescence. I was wandering around in the upstairs rooms I enjoyed as a teenager in our house in Richardson, TX, and my longtime-schoolmate Joel Efrussy was there. I was explaining to him in an expert tone my theory of the causal link between certain types of coat-hangers and various disease-states--some types of coathangers could cause anemia, for instance. My tone was sardonical, and Joel understood it to be sardonical, but both of us winked at the joke and played along, he nodding and grunting appreciatively, and I gesturing and expounding dramatically. During the discourse I wandered back and forth between my sitting room and my bathroom, changing clothes, and I definitely remember that at one point I was talking to him with my pants around my ankles, wearing only boxers besides. I was at ease in this condition, but he was not. Before he left he regarded me with concern and asked if I were abusing cocaine, and I assured him that I had not taken cocaine in a very long time. After he left it seemed like a lie, and I had to reassure myself again that, no, I was not abusing cocaine.

Which is the last thing I remember before awaking, again myself at 30. In the foggy transition state that is more waking than sleeping but not very clearly either, I was assailed by a sense of nostalgia for friends and associates from high school--Joel, Lindsey Grayson, Melissa Henry. I could not, at the time, remember Melissa's name, but I did remember catching mononucleosis by kissing her, which led eventually to my two-years-long bout with tonsilitis and associated health problems, and which I mark as the beginning of the depression which characterized most of my 20s and the origin of my taste for prescription painkillers. I began then to think of my mother, and of the fact that, at thirty, I am still the focus of her irrational anxiety, when it materializes, and of the responsibility that devolves upon me in that position. I had again the thought, which assails me in times of despair, that I was living only to protect my mother from the pain of my death, and that--somewhat shamefully I write it--once she were gone I would at last be free to die. Then the mounting pressure of despair was upon me, and I felt panic swell as I lay there in the darkness in the bed with my beloved, and in that moment even she I questioned, and some effort was required not to begin crying.

And I was reminded of a scene from Roman Polanski's film "The Tenant," in which the protagonist, played by Polanski himself, witnesses a similar emotional breakdown in a woman in a cafe who is, to him, essentially a total stranger. She is so far gone that she does not care whether she weeps publicly or not. After looking uncomfortable for a moment, he rises to the occassion, grips her by the arm, and says with appropriate concern, "You must not give in to despair." The sense of the scene (the mise-en-scene, maybe?), however, is that it's a hopeless effort and he is rather naive to try to help her. Still, I was comforted by the memory of the line--"You must not give in to despair"--and I think that is because it both offers practical advice to the desparate and, in its succinctness, in its familiarity, in its ethos, it suggests a commonality of experience which is the best balm for profound suffering: The sense that one is not alone in one's unhappiness. We all know the experience of despair. It is utterly common to the human condition, and the sin is not in feeling it, but in giving up in the face of it. There *is*, of course, a certain reward that comes to those who do give in to despair, but it is a bitter peace, and it is characterized by the kind of eagerness for death that culminates in suicide. Acceptance of death, of course, is a fundamental spiritual milestone, but I do not believe at present that total abnegation of hope is the correct route thereunto.

Which leads me to consider the sensation of despair: What is it? The adjective that first comes to mind, when I free-associate the word "despair," is "overwhelming," and I think if we were to examine the average English sentence containing the word "despair," very often the word "overwhelming" would appear nearby. Despair overwhelms us, in the sense that we feel powerless or hopeless before it. That, indeed, is the essence of despair--the obliteration of hope beneath a crushing wave of guilt, sadness, and anxiety. These emotions are the triple threat of depression: The afflicted person is guilty about the past, sad about the present, and anxious about the future. All three temporal faculties--memory, perception, and imagination--are colored by darkness. This taxonomy is interesting to me, in that, like all taxonomies, it suggests a systematic approach to the problem: To manage despair, we need healthy ways of responding to the past we remember, to the present we perceive, and to the future we imagine.Now, as I write, both the act of writing and the physiochemical transition from sleeping to waking have relieved me--the despair I felt on awakening has evaporated almost completely and I can see the potential of the day. This is a transformation I have to undergo almost every day of my life. Usually on waking (in the morning, at least), I am more or less miserable, and the temptation to retreat back into sleep, rather than face the uphill climb into consciousness, is strong, which is why I frequently sleep so late. If I am somehow obliged to be awake, I will eventually overcome my inertia and find my happy place again, but very often it takes an hour or two to get there. I have a hard time with afternoons, as well. My best times are the dusk-hours from 6 to midnight; this is the time that the earth seems most beautiful to me. This type of daily mood-cycle, again, is characteristic of the clinically depressed, although, like most of the qualities of that disease, almost everyone experiences it to a lesser extent. Thus we have "morning people" and "night people." This observation itself suggests a strategy: I should try to schedule my activities so that I can sleep during the times of day which are most unpleasant to me.

And that's what all this is about, ultimately: strategies. I was terribly afraid when I began this journal that it would be nothing more than an exercise in adolescent "whine-tasting"--a chance for me to come out and pray openly on the streetcorner like the Pharisees. BUt that's not what it is: It's about examining my emotions so I can find intelligent ways of coping with them. Did I make any progress today? I think so. Recognizing that I'm a night person and planning my days accordingly--that is, chiefly to avoid obligations in the afternoon--is a good one. Another useful trick is recognizing the difficulty of mornings for me and trying to plan to ease them: going to bed early, taking measures to ensure comfortable sleep, and doing something I enjoy first thing are all useful strategies in this regard. Also, the breakdown of phenomena into memory/perception/imagination is also a useful starting point--I should begin collecting positive mediations for each mode. I already have one: the guided mindfulness regime promulgated by Jon Kabat-Zinn is exactly a meditative exercise for improving the present. That may be the best place to begin.

Salutaridine Synthase

2006-01-12T14:07:00.001-06:00

Today I met with Dr. Marvin Hackert, a specialist in protein crystallization at the University of Texas at Austin, to discuss my plans to isolate and crystallize an enzyme critical in the biosynthesis of morphine, which I imagine as a step on the way to developing a synthetic or semi-synthetic catalytic preparation for use in the manufacture of morphine. The enzyme, salutaradine synthase, has not previously been crystallized and the purpose of doing so would be to determine its 3D structure, particularly at and around the active site.

My notes from the meeting suggest a two-sided approach to the problem, which might be called top-down and bottom-up. The top-down approach is theoretical; it begins with the enzyme's gene sequence, or that of an isoform, and would approximate the 3D structure by computerized "fitting" of the primary sequence derived from the genome to the known structure of an analogous protein, if one can be found. Although inexact, this approach has the virtue of being inexpensive. It could give useful insight into the structure of the active site and, hence, to the mechanism of catalysis, thus paving the way for the development of an entirely synthetic catalytic system. The program to perform the "morphing" operation in which the sequence is extrapolated to a structure by analogy to a known protein is called SWISS-PDB, and is freely available through the internet.

On the practical side, the approach would be to isolate and purify the enzyme from a homogenous biological sample, crystallize it, and attempt to regenerate its catalytic activity in vitro. It would appear that the 1995 Amann, et. al, paper includes an assay that depends on the catalytic activity of the enzyme to track it through the isolation and purification process. This is something of a revelation, as my previous understanding was that the enzyme was inert apart from its associated cell membrane and that it had not been regenerated in vitro. It's a good sign because it indicates that such regeneration is possible and, moreover, routine enough to be used as an assay. Even if I fail ultimately to determine empirically the protein's structure, development of a reusable catalyst derived from the biological matrix could provide publishable and patentable results. Although this secondary goal does not require elucidation of the enzyme's structure, the effort to crystallize the protein is wasted in the absence of sequence data, because ultimate structural determination depends on both an x-ray diffraction pattern and knowledge of the primary structure.

First questions:

1. What parts of the poppy genome have been sequenced?

2. Is there compelling evidence of the existence of salutaradine synthases in man?

3. Are the seminal investigators still working on this problem and are they willing to talk?

4. How much protein should I reasonably expect to need for the crystallization project?

A Light-Sensitive Chemical Fuse

2006-01-03T17:04:00.001-06:00

My second idea is more trivial and probably doesn't have useful applications--or at least, not any that could not be done more safely and reliably by electronic or electromechanical systems. Briefly, it is a light-sensitive chemical fuse for explosives, and is inspired by the chemical-time-delay fuses used by Allied amphibious saboteurs during the Second World War to set off "Limpet" magnetic mines below the waterlines of enemy ships in port. This fuse, the operation and history of which are explained in great detail on pp. 98-99 of Dorling-Kindersley's "The Ultimate Spy Book," used a mixture of water and acetone to dissolve a celluloid disk restraining a spring-loaded firing pin; when the disk dissolved, the pin was released to mechanically initiate the primer charge. The concentration of acetone in the water-acetone mixture determined the rate of dissolution of the celluloid and, hence, the delay before firing. Fuses were equipped with interchangeable glass ampoules containing various concentrations of acetone and water which had been calibrated to produce various delays ranging from several days to a few hours and identified by color-coding the ampoule glass. An orange ampoule, for instance, produced a delay of 6 to 9 hours, depending on the ambient temperature. The fuses were armed by turning a screw which crushed the ampoule, spilling its contents onto the celluloid disk and beginning the process of dissolution.

My own idea works along the same general principle, but uses a different chemical system to release the firing pin in response to daylight. The charge is placed during the nighttime hours and is armed by removing a cap covering the transparent reaction chamber. When the sun rises, the light enters the exposed reaction chamber and initiates a radical chain-reaction between liquid bromine and a suitable alkane, producing the corresponding haloalkane and, most importantly, hydrobromic acid. The acid dissolves a thin metal disk restraining the firing pin and thus initiates mechanical detonation as in the Limpet mine. Because the reaction is a chain process, the presence of even a small amount of radical initiator, such as that produced by heat-induced homolytic decomposition of molecular bromine, could ultimately cause premature release of the pin. Such an eventuality would render the fuse useless and would be dangerous to the operator. Thus the system must be stabilized by the addition of a few percent of a radical inhibitor such as TEMPO (2,2,6,6-tetramethylpiperidinoxyl). This would prevent "substoichiometric" exposure to light and/or heat from initiating the reaction.

"Tuning" the system to produce the proper combination of substrate alkane, reactant concentrations, and disk metal and thickness would be the object of some applied research. The design criteria are that the system be shelf-stable, heat-resistant, shock-resistant, economical, and fast-acting under the appropriate conditions.

Certainly there are electronic systems already in existence that could serve analogously as a photofuse. Thus some advantage must accrue to the use of an all-chemical system to justify the development expense. The chemical system proposed is fairly straightforward and is derived from a basic reaction found in any respectable sophomore organic chemistry text. For this reason, such a device is relatively obvious and may already have been developed, patented, manufactured, and/or used. Likewise, there may be a more esoteric photosensitive reaction that could be better made to serve the same purpose. I'd have to peruse the patent and academic literature to determine these questions, and given that no compelling demand for the chemicomechanical switch seems to exist, such researches are probably not worth the effort. Lastly, I would point out that, although the device I propose has been described hereinbefore as a fuse for detonating explosives, it could in fact be applied to any single-use photoswitching application; one simply would substitute the firing pin with a spring-loaded electrical switch or mechanical linkage that would activate whatever mechanism.

Back to What I Do Best

2006-01-03T17:04:00.000-06:00

Today I put personal, philosohical, and aesthetic/literary speculation aside for a moment to concentrate on my preferred activity, which is invention. And by that I mean invention in the Thomas Edison sense. My friend Billy once told me that he could see me making a living as an old-school bowtie wearing "inventor," and many of my lifescripts involve coming up with some clever new product or process and starting up a company to exploit it commercially. Today I have two ideas that came to me while reviewing my sophomore organic chemistry text in preparation for the Spring qualifying exam in the UT O-chem division.

The first is a computerized reaction-predicting expert system incorporating a large neural-net architecture and trained using the CAS reaction database. One of the foremost marketable skills of an accomplished chemist is his or her ability to make better guesses than most folk about what will happen chemically when particular substances are combined under particular conditions. This ability accrues from long years of experience performing and studying chemical reactions and by the judicious application of analogic reasoning. A neural net is a computer system which imitates in a data structure the connectivity of animal neurons in a brain, and has been proven and applied to be useful--just like a human brain--in many complex pattern-recognition problems. At UT, for example, departmental chemists are working on developing an artificial chemical analysis system that imitates the human system of taste, mostly in that it uses a neural net and must be trained, like a real brain, to recognize certain chemical species by their "flavor." Basically, a large number of colorimetric chemical probes are combined into a single raster image, with each pixel representing the colorimetric response of a particular probe. The neural net "looks" at the complex picture that results and, during the training process, learns to associate particular patterns with particular analytes; subsequently it is able to identify solutions containing the same or similar analytes. Research is ongoing to develop the resolution of the system to a manportable "electronic tongue" that could be used to qualitatively identify all kinds of chemical mixtures in real-world applications. An interesting result of the neural-net pattern recognition process is that IT DOES NOT MATTER EXACTLY WHAT EACH CHEMICAL PROBE IS RESPONDING TO, only that there are a lot of them and that they respond in different ways. Thus the designers, builders, and operators never need to know if the color changes are happening as a result of pH or hydrophobic interactions or enzymatic complexing or any other conceivable chemical process--as long as there are a sufficient number of independently-responding probe channels the resulting patterns can still be diagnostic of particular analytes.

I propose to use the same technology to predict what will happen in a chemical system containing particular substances under particular conditions. The user inputs the chemical species present and the reaction conditions--including pressure and temperature ramps--and the system makes qualitative and quantitative predictions as to the outcome. It does this not by simulation or by theory-based calculations, but by pure neural-net-based pattern recognition based on extensive training from a database of known reactions. Since the introduction of computerized information storage and retrieval in chemistry, the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) has been assembling a large electronic database of experimentally-proven reactions; today this database contains tens of millions of known reactions including products, conditions, and yields, all already stored in an electronic format designed to be machine-parsable. So the software I propose would simply build an enormous virtual neural-net on a computer's hard disk (as large and complex a net as can be reasonably constructed given the presen state of the computational art), and then would automatically parse the entire CAS reaction database and use it to train the neural net. Subsequently the system's predictions would be tested against the outcome of real chemical reactions which were not part of the training set. Whether initially successful or not, the system could be designed to automatically familiarize itself with new reactions as the CAS reaction database was updated. Sooner or later in the course of technological history, depending on the rate of development of computational power and on the rate of accumulation of chemical knowledge in the CAS database, the system *will* begin to make practically useful predictions. My own intuition is that both contributing factors are already sufficiently advanced to allow useful predictions to be made given the present-day condition of technology, but of course only actual development and testing of the system will tell for certain. In fact, I would be surprised if such a system is not already in development/operation. If anyone who reads this knows of such an effort, I would love to hear about it.

Walking Dead Volume 4

2005-12-30T18:32:00.000-06:00

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS

So I've been reading this comic book, The Walking Dead, by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn. The geist of the narrative is the realistic dramatic depiction of the lives and loves of a group of survivors of a zombie apocalypse. It is gritty in its realism and generally (surprise) very depressing. The protagonist is white-boy small-town-hero cop Rick, who is shot in the line of duty, falls into a coma, and wakes up alone in the hospital a month after Z-day. He sets out for Atlanta, hoping against hope that his wife and child have survived and are in hiding there. Miraculously, he finds them, intact and in the care of his partner and best friend, among a group of survivors camped outside of the city awaiting government rescue. In his absence and based on the presumption of his death, Rick's partner has begun to move in on Rick's wife, and Rick's unexpected return initiates a power struggle between the two friends that culminates in the breakdown of the partner and, ultimately, in his death in a defensive shooting by Rick's young son. The remaining survivors take Rick as their leader and, realizing that no one is coming to rescue them, set out across the countryside in search of a safer place to live. They have several false starts and lose many of their party in heart-wrenching ways before happening upon a maximum-security prison, which they all recognize immediately as an ideal survivalist encampment, assuming they can clear the zombies out frist. In the process of doing so, they discover four surviving prisoners holed-up in the cafeteria: Dexter, a big scary black guy who killed his cheating girlfriend and her lover; Axel, a big scary white guy who looks a little like a Hell's Angels Santa Claus; a forgettable-by-design skinny black ex-junkie who is Dexter's punk lover; and, lastly, a wimpy bespectacled nonthreatening balding middle-age white guy who admits conviction for "tax fraud." The outsiders join forces with the prisoners and secure the rest of the prison for safe habitation. Things seem to be going well until one of our favorite female characters turns up decapitated. Immediately suspecting the convicted murderer, Rick and his party lock Dexter up again in his old cell. Two little girls are decaptiated and another woman mutilated before the killer is revealed, somewhat predictably, as the nonthreatening "tax" criminal. The murders raise an archetypal problem in survivalist fiction, viz. the re-establishment of law and order. Rick steps to the fore and, like Moses, declares the new law: "You kill, you die." The killer is thrown to the zombies outside the prison gate.

Meanwhile, with the assistance of his lover, the embittered Dexter breaks out of his cell and into the heretofor-sealed-off "A block" of the prison, where he raids the armory. Brandishing a shotgun, he corners Rick and his party by the gate and demands: leave the prison or die. Unfortunately, Dexter and his lover forgot to close the A-block door behind them when they left, and the standoff is interrupted by the flood of hungry zombies they unwittingly released. The ensuing battle pits all the survivors--Dexter and his lover included--against the walking dead. During the course of the firefight, a zombie ambushes Dexter from behind and Rick--perhaps acting reflexively--shoots it in the brain, thus saving Dexter's life. Dexter glares at him and says "Don't mean shit. That don't change a fucking thing. Smart man woulda let it get me."

Upon which Rick, after thinking it over for a second, calmly shoots Dexter through the head. Subsequently, he blames Dexter’s death on anonymous and accidental "friendly fire" during the pitched battle with the zombies.

This decision on Rick's part, to kill Dexter in more-or-less cold blood, eventually precipitates a moral crisis amongst the survivors and, by proxy, amongst the book's real-world readership. As a result of it, Rick is demoted from his position as sole leader and a voting council of four men (on which Rick himself has a seat) installed in his place. Rick is not upset by the demotion, but is, rather, by the judgment against his character which devolves from his killing of Dexter.

Which is really what I went through all of that to discuss. Although clearly in contradiction to Rick's rather simple-minded you-kill-you-die edict, my own emotional reaction to Rick's decision is that it was prudent, both from the point of view of personal self-defense and, especially, from the special position of authority and responsibility which is Rick's as designated leader of the group. Dexter's attitude, words, and actions clearly indicated that he regarded and would continue to regard Rick and his party as enemies, and that as soon as the immediate threat of zombie attack was met, his assault on Rick, Rick's family, and the group under Rick's protection would be renewed. Given the life-or-death consequences of expulsion from the prison, Rick's decision is clearly justified. His biggest mistake is trying to cover it up by blaming the killing on "friendly fire," which he justifies later by claiming he did not want so openly to contradict his own edict and thus potentially undermine the group's faith in him as a leader. This, of course, is the ultimate result anyway, but it might not have been--indeed, I would argue, it SHOULD not have been--if Rick had come clean about the killing at the time. His first and most fundamental mistake was to establish a homicide law with no provision for justified self-defense, which the killing of Dexter rather clearly constitutes.

If the incident in which Dexter scorns Rick’s saving of his life had not taken place, the issue would not be so clear-cut. In shooting the zombie threatening Dexter, Rick has diverted his attention, his efforts, and his ammunition from the defense of himself and his allies. Things being as they are, he would have been perfectly justified in not doing so; even Dexter himself acknowledges this. That he does so in spite of their prevailing conflict is evidence of the goodness of his character—-he still hopes that Dexter’s relationship to the group can be repaired and, perhaps, believes that life in and of itself is worth saving. Dexter’s ingratitude at the gesture is infuriating in its vulgarity and its stupidity; smart man, we are tempted to chastise him, woulda kept his mouth shut. From a legalistic perspective, moreover, it provides all the evidence Rick needs that Dexter is a continued threat and should be eliminated as a matter of rational self-defense. This is the important point: Dexter’s statement is evidence of his ongoing hostile intent.

So offensive is Dexter’s ingratitude, in fact, that in itself it might seem grounds for Rick’s action. It is tempting, along this line, to argue that Rick’s saving of Dexter’s life entitles him, for at least a short of period of time, to renege on that decision and end it. This is in keeping with the tradition, in many cultures, that a person whose life is saved by another is thereby indentured to that person, in a sense, and is obliged to serve his or her savior until death or the return of the favor. Consider the following twist on the situation: Dexter is in the act of staging a public suicide, with a gun to his own head, when the zombie attack breaks out. Rick then saves his life exactly as before, and Dexter responds, again ungratefully, weeping, “Shoulda let it get me, man. Shoulda let it get me.” Would Rick then be justified in killing him? Most folks, I think, would say “no.” Therefore we reject the notion of a special “license to kill” that devolves upon Rick on his saving of Drexel’s life, and likewise of the “aesthetic” argument that Drexel’s ingratitude itself justifies the homicide.

But, given that the killing-as-told is clearly justifiable, why is Rick judged? Certainly he made mistakes, as mentioned above: He established an overly-simplistic law and then tried to cover up his own violation thereof. But overall his actions were entirely well-intentioned if not, perhaps, as well-thought-out as they might be. Rick is a cop, after all, not a lawyer or an intellectual. Why then does Tyreese, in particular, hold him to blame for Dexter’s killing? The answer, in keeping with the general direction that many of the book’s subplots are moving, is racism. Tyreese, a strong black man who, up to this point in the story, has been Rick’s best friend, made a brief living as a pro football player before Z-day. Although, by his own admission, he was not very good and did not last very long in the pro league, he made enough money during his brief stint to establish a comfortable middle-class living for himself and his daughter, who, in one of many tragic subplots, dies in a suicide pact with her white boyfriend early on in the story. Tyreese understands, in a way that Rick probably never can, the anger Dexter must’ve felt at being wrongly imprisoned for a crazy white man’s crimes, and surely he must wonder, if Dexter had been white, would Rick still have pulled the trigger? Dexter, as I’ve already hinted at, was (probably deliberately) drawn by the book’s authors as the prototypical white suburbanite’s nightmare nigger: physically powerful, none too bright, extremely angry, and prone to violence. Although Rick, unlike some of the book’s other characters, is not consciously racist, he is a white police officer from a small town in Georgia, and the other survivors-—who were probably not privy to the brief dialogue that precipitated the killing—-must surely wonder to what extent Rick’s subconscious fears might’ve motivated the shooting. Rick’s hypocrisy in the application of his own moral code, by which he himself should be killed for killing Dexter, also invites racist suspicions when compared to the treatment of the “tax criminal.” Although their crimes are not really comparable, the code that justified the execution of the murderer clearly justifies Rick’s own execution, and the fact that such reciprocation isn’t even briefly considered by any of the parties concerned seems to suggest that, while killing a white woman will get you thrown to the zombies, killing a black man elicits little more than a slap on the wrist. It’s somewhat of a manufactured crisis that can be dispelled with a bit of rational thinking, but as any reader of the book must understand, people, and these characters in particular, aren’t always rational people. Clearly, a storm of racial tension is coming in book 5.

Whew. That was a lot of high-minded speculation over a comic book, but it felt good to do it. Although I was somewhat disappointed with the 4th and most recent volume of The Walking Dead, the fact that it elicited so much moral speculation on my part indicates that it’s still an effective and engaging story. My disappointment on finishing the 4th volume was really the disappointment of a junkie who, having waited three months to score, finds that he has not bought enough dope to satisfy his craving. The storyline of TWD is incredibly engrossing, and, because of the nature of the comics medium, it can be consumed orders of magnitude faster than it can be produced. Although it’s an ideal situation in terms of sales and marketing, it’s not really enjoyable, as a reader, to be constantly strung out. I have the option, of course, of buying the individual monthly issues instead of the bound quarterly volumes, but that is somewhat of an affront to my compulsive side, which wants my entire TWD collection to be in a consistent format. Maybe I’ll buy the monthly issues and then sell them back when the quarterly volumes come out, if I can find a place that will buy them from me.

If you managed to stick with me through all that, all I can say is “Thanks.” :) If you feel inclined, you might do me (and yourself) a favor: go out and buy or borrow the series, read it for yourself, and let me know what you think. John Gardner has called fiction the art of “concrete philosophy;” if that’s so, then arguing about books and their meanings is one of the best things we can do to better ourselves as philosophers.

Opting Out

2005-12-22T22:22:00.000-06:00

Christmas is a hard time to think about opting out of consumer society. Or maybe not. In one sense, it's hard because all around people are buying stuff and receiving gifts and generally wrapped up in the material posessions that make them happy. So envy, of both posessions and people, can make it hard. On the other hand, wanton commercialization around the holiday season has gotten so bad that even the most jaded yuppies probably notice it. So our moral and aesthetic judgements of the season's excesses can make it easier to consider alternatives.

The most important thing I've done to "opt out" of the society of desire is stop watching television. On the one hand, this has improved my life because I do not, in general, suffer from cravings for the latest video games or movies or cars or books or other widgets. Also, I am freed from the paranoid atmosphere which television advertisers, journalists, and dramatists foster each for their respective purposes. The down side is that I also feel, at times, very alone, very excluded from the collective consciousness of the species which, let's face it, is centered squarely on the boob tube. The internet can help a lot in this latter regard; if I would use it more dilligently than I do now it would be relatively easy to substitute an online virtual community for the virtual community I lost when I turned away from TV. And the online community is superior to the television community in many ways. For one, it listens when I talk back to it.

Another thing I've done to opt out of consumer society, deliberately or accidentally, is to surround myself with intelligent people who don't care overmuch about such things. Austin, TX, is a good place to be interested in nonconsensus reality, because despite the best efforts of the Starbuckses and Piers 1 of the world, Austin is still wierd. And austin will probably always be weird, to a greater or lesser extent, because of the concentration of educated intellectuals from all over the state at the University of Texas. The state and the school are some of the largest in the nation, and Austin tends to function as a refuge for bright young folks from the ignorant backwoods hellholes they were raised in. I would not go so far to say that rural life is inherently bad, but there's no question that people in big cities tend to be better educated and better paid. Austin, in particular, is often touted as the most educated city in the world on a per-capita basis. Even the cable guy's got an MA in something or other. And the most essential process of education is to make people tolerant of others' viewpoints.

What's more, I'm situated close enough to the University where I work and learn that I don't have to use my car very often. In point of fact, it would be fairly easy for me to do without a car entirely in my present situation; groceries, entertainment, food, work, and education are all within a few blocks' walking distance of my front door. College campuses tend to be some of the greatest pedestrian communities in the world, and UT's, being so large and so old, is a fairly stellar example. I've got a friend who's been living in west campus for years without a car, caring for his sick mother, walking everywhere and working out of a small apartment priced for and targetted at the student market. The *dis*advantage of this location is that the real estate is expensive, and thus that the population tends to be wealthy rich-kid and frat-brother types. So from a keeping-up-with-the-neighbors perspective, it can be hard to adopt an openly anti-materialist lifestyle.

Still, all and all, I'm not doing too badly. I make $1600 a month and it's more than enough for me; in fact I'm inadvertently saving up quite a bundle while I'm in school. By the time I graduate I will probably be able to put a down-payment on a house. What I need to be doing right now is paying more attention to my living space; it needs to be cleaned and redecorated to be really comfortable, and up to now I really haven't had the emotional energy or the time to do these things since, barring spending a lot of money, they entail a lot of work. Hopefully over the winter break I'll have time to get some of that done.

So what did I resolve? First, to put more effort into developing and maintaining an on-line community that I can feel a part of as a TV-replacement. Second, to pay more attention to the upkeep of my pad, so that it's a pleasant place to be both by myself and with company.

Blogging

2005-12-21T12:41:00.000-06:00

I've defiled so many virgin journals in my life; I can never commit. I can be pretty good about keeping a journal when my life's in the crapper, but as soon as things turn around (which writing itself tends to induce) I lose interest and go back to fiddling with LEGOs or something. And that's no way to maintain a relationship.

Now, when I say "my life's in the crapper," what I really mean is "I'm depressed." From an objective point of view, my life is categorically *not* in the crapper. I have a beautiful girlfriend and a spacious condo within walking distance of the university where I am a successful graduate student in synthetic chemistry. I get along great with my happily-married-after-thirty-years parents and I see them once or twice a week. The stipend I get from the university is more than enough to live comfortably on. And yet my baseline happiness level is low; so low, in fact, that I am often tempted to the use of pseudolegal drugs to elevate my mood.

It's a pervasive phenomenon, now and probably always in American (and possibly general human) society: The person who has all the secular trappings of a happy life and yet is still fairly *un*happy on a day-to-day basis. A lot of people--my parents, for instance--would tell me that what's missing in my life is spirituality, and to a point I think I'm inclined to agree. This is a touchy subject for me, however; my break with the Church of Christ as a teenager was acrimonious and I am still bitter about it. I believe the essential tenets of Christian dogma are irrational and readily corrupted to justify all kinds of horrific actions and attitudes. What's more, by the time it's watered down enough that I can stomach it, it's become as limp and flavorless as unitarianism. I personally think the whole enterprise should be scrapped and our attitudes reconfigured along the lines of the Dalai Lama's teachings, the gist of which, as I understand them, is:

Compassion for the sufferings of others is the only lasting way to ease one's own, personal, suffering.

This is a philosophical judo-throw in the spirit of Adam Smith--the selflessness of selfishness. The analogy to laissez-faire economics is not hard to make. "By serving one's own interest, one ultimately serves the communal interest."

Some folks, I suppose, would be offended by that analogy. But I think it's accurate, to a point. The difference is that Smith's and the Dalai Lama's arguments are opposed in their causalities: Smith starts by asking "What makes for a happy society?" and answers "Selfish people"; the Dalai Lama starts by asking "What makes for a happy person?" and answers "Selfless concern for society." This is a vast simplification of both arguments, of course, and it may not be possible to draw any really meaningful conclusions from it. We should not, for instance, give in to the superficial temptation to say that capitalism is thus incompatible with personal happiness as the Dalai Lama sees it.

Or should we?

There's no doubt whatsoever that consumer society is bad for personal happiness, or at least that a philosophy which is grounded too strongly in materialism is bad for personal happiness. And it seems clear that when the monetary powers-that-be pursue their own rational self-interest in the spirit of Smith what results is a consumer society filled with advertisements and meaningless schlock to be bought and sold. And to make such a large market for so much stuff that people really don't need one has to generate a culture of consumption in which people feel inadequate without late models cars, appliances, homes, etc. Desire, the Buddhists say, is the origin of suffering.

Thus, isn't a culture that feeds on material desire really a culture that feeds on human suffering?I think just maybe it is. So how do I opt out?

Therein lies the rub.