Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Interesting Clippings from Globe and Mail

I read the Globe and Mail over the weekend and there were some interesting articles that caught my eye:

A] Taking Christ Out of Christianity [LINK]

"There is no authoritative Big-Godism, as Rev. Gretta Vosper, West Hill's minister for the past 10 years, puts it. No petitionary prayers (“Dear God, step into the world and do good things about global warming and the poor”). No miracles-performing magic Jesus given birth by a virgin and coming back to life. No references to salvation, Christianity's teaching of the final victory over death through belief in Jesus's death as an atonement for sin and the omnipotent love of God. For that matter, no omnipotent God, or god."

This is amazing, what they want is the comforting tradition and religious sentiment. One could argue then that if we want a "true" Christianity we need to remove the comforting traditions and religious sentiments and we might approach what Jesus intended. In my opinion, the Church is here for comfort. That is comfort in the old military meaning of the word ... to bring back strength to the wounded so they can return to the battlefield (not fort-up and shoot tracts at the lost).

B] God's Sugar Daddy [Link]

This biographical article is written by a freelance writer that normally writes a modern life column for the style section of the GandM. That said, she is a literate and insightful young woman who does her work.

The article is about John Templeton who as an investor was able to make billions by the old "Buy-low-sell-high" mantra but who is so frugal that while he owns a significant part of Kia he refused to buy a Kia automobile because he thought they were overpriced.

The point is that John Templeton has personally financed a wide spectrum of prizes in the Science and Spirit research. In fact the Templeton Prize is larger than the Nobel Prize. This has fostered a research culture that is a small mirror of the kept scientists that work for the secular research funding agencies. This really has ticked off the secular scientists. It all comes from the heart and mind of a very rich, very curious and very aware old man. One wonders what will happen when he eventually passes away and the source of this reviving vision fades with him.

C] Jesus the Jew and the Christian cover-up [Link]

"The short version of Wilson's thesis, which he calls the "Jesus Cover-Up Thesis," is this: The spiritual figure that billions of Christians worship worldwide as the Son of God was, in fact, a Jew, a rabbi, and a revered teacher of the early first century who obeyed and championed the Torah. Jesus (or more accurately in Hebrew, Yehoshua or Yeshu) prayed in synagogue and urged his followers to adhere strictly to Jewish law. Only in this way, he promised, would the Kingdom of God become a reality. Wilson probes the Jewish roots of the Lord's Prayer, the Sermon on the Mount and the Last Supper (which is more commonly recognized as a Passover seder, although there were likely many more people in attendance than the 12 disciples portrayed in Leonardo da Vinci's celebrated painting). In Wilson's view, Jesus wanted to improve Jewish life, not abolish it. He did not proclaim himself to be a "Christ" figure or a "Son of God." That came later."

The Bible says that there is no new thing under the Sun and I have heard this message in a number of forms since I was young but is seems that it is being refined and becoming more "fashionable". Keep an eye on this one I think it is going to grow.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Ch-Ch-Changes

I have used Raymond Chang's Text "General Chemistry" since the fall of 2000 for Intro Chem 1013 and 1023. The publisher had managed to keep the cost down and I could live with the content and pace. I had issues with how boring the text was and the constant tension that students had when I taught something a bit differently from the text.

So that is why I spent Monday and Tuesday of this week visiting Dalhousie University. The chemistry department at Dal has developed an in-house chemistry textbook written by almost the entire faculty. The intention was to strip everything from the text that wasn't actually taught in the lectures, to support the lectures with tutorial help and to test concepts and content as taught in the lectures. The text was designed to function as a lecture notebook in addition to the text itself so that a third of each page is available for notes and the binding allows the book to be opened so that each page will lie flat. Finally instead of chapters the content is divided into much shorter sections designed to be less intimidating to cover.

All in all I was very impressed. They are teaching about 1000 students in classes of about 120. We sat in on one regular lecture given by my post-doctoral supervisor. It was clear that the students had bought into the whole concept of the text and most were recording their notes directly into their textbooks.


So, I have pretty much decided to use the Dalhouse text here at ABU this coming academic year. The text should cost less to the student and we will cover everything in the text and test that content only. It is an experiment and the only difference will be the amount of tutorial support that I will have to offer in support of the lectures. I am looking forward to the change.

Saturday, March 15, 2008

The Long List of Chemistry Professors Cooler Than Me

This is a link to a video that my son made from some raw tape of a demonstration that I did a while back. This may be the only proof in existence that I can move faster than a slow walk.


Now, there are tons of chemistry demonstration videos out there and there are two sites that I think have done the best job of collecting them. They really are worth an evenings look for your typical science nerd or geek.




Friday, March 14, 2008

It's Only There if You Look


There have been some cool articles recently on pharmaceuticals in our water. The pharmaceuticals get there by two means 1) we take too much and it is excreted into our sewerage or 2) we just flush unused drugs. Now, it should concern us that there is a clear link between sewerage and our drinking water. I mean if Jane up river from you is taking birth control pills and is excreting the excess drug in her urine why is it showing up in my drinking water and more ominously I only know of the birth control drugs because I looked. What else is there?

In the Chemical and Engineering News article (LINK) I like the statement:

"FOR THREE SUMMERS, Kidd and her colleagues spiked a lake in Canada's Experimental Lakes Area with 17α-ethinylestradiol at a concentration of 5 ppt—a concentration that has been measured in municipal wastewaters and in river waters downstream of discharges. During the autumn that followed the first addition of the estrogenic compound, the researchers observed delayed sperm cell development in male fathead minnows—the freshwater equivalent of a canary in a coal mine. A year later, the male fathead minnows were producing eggs and had largely stopped reproducing. The minnow population began to plummet. The decline continued for an additional three years until the fish had all but disappeared from the lake."


These are the ones that seem to be everywhere in small amounts that you need to think about when you drink your glass of water:

17alpha-Ethinylestradiol (synthetic birth control)
Carbamazepine (anticonvulsant and mood stabilizing drug)
Diclofenac (nonsteroidal, anti-inflammatory drug, there is a cool back story on this one concerning the vultures that "clean-up" dead bodies in India)
Fluoxetine (Prozac, antidepressant)

Now, we need to couple alarm with common sense. The concentrations are very low and far below any known toxic effect. But on the other hand, while it is true that the concentrations of birth control drugs are not going to kill fish but it will make the male fish grow eggs. I think I'd rather die. Still I will leave the risk-benefit discussion to the experts:

""The treatment processes we have are highly effective," Snyder concludes. He points out that we're seeing more pharmaceuticals in our environment because we're getting better at detecting them, not necessarily because there are more of them. It's therefore important, he says, to develop toxicologically based limits for pharmaceuticals in our water. "If we ignore concentration and say presence or absence is our litmus test, then there will be no end to that," Snyder says. "Detection does not infer health risk and nondetection does not ensure safety.""

Friday Post: But is it Cheating?

We have both chemistry and academic dishonesty in the news these days. Seems that a chemistry course at Ryerson prompted some students to create an online exchange of solutions for course quizzes and labs. When the faculty found out the host student was charged with academic dishonesty.

In the classic rationalization of this generation the main argument by the student is that since this is no different from students exchanging answers in the library they are blameless. It just doesn't sink in that when you pass in work that you claim is your own you are expected to have done it on your own. Yes, other students may be cheating by other means but you were caught.

Being open about cheating does not absolve you from cheating ... one might argue that zebras learn to run from lions not because they all get caught but because every now and then one of them gets caught.


Thursday, March 06, 2008

Friday Cartoon

With apologies to Jorge Cham ...

Warning! This Post Will Offend You.

OK, I am going to get in trouble for this but it has to be said. Environmentalists as a group tend to be self righteous and inconsistent. Take Jabba the Hut ... I mean Al Gore and his Nobel Prize for Environmentalism. It seems that his movement itself does not seek carbon friendly alternatives for transportation and he has not significantly changed his own mansion or lifestyle to be more environmentally friendly. It is always easier to harangue others and make them feel shame then to change ones own behaviour. Perhaps that is why the modern media take delight in pointing out hypocritical inconsistencies in the lives of evangelists. Life is hard in the unblinking light at the top of the pedestal. So, there is a chemistry blog that I monitor and the young man that maintains the site has been blessed with a child. This prompted a debate on the disposable versus cloth issue.
Now, thankfully our family has ceased to be blessed with children and ours are graduating high school and getting drivers licences. I would expect that the next time we have to discuss the whole disposable vs cloth debate will be when the children have children or when I become incontinent (probably a close race). I do remember however the horror and pain inflicted on my wife and I when we openly (and one might say gratefully) mostly used disposable diapers. It seemed that people we did not know would go out of their way to let us know the damage that we were inflicting on the environment by using the Devil's Nappies.

OR



Now, there is a whole articulated debate out there about the issue and if one counts the "whole cost" of cloth diapers they seem to not be as benign as originally advertised. And that is one point that bugs me about environmentalists. In any accounting they make of the cost of an item they endorse they assume that time = $ 0. I mean, they invoke an earlier, simpler time when rural folk naturally "reduced-reused-recycled". What they forget is that that ethos was developed between the twin grinding stones of Poverty and Necessity.

You can see them in your churches. They are dying out now, in the same way that our war veterans are passing from society. They are older women who have lived the "simple life". And while it absolutely consumed them the pressure also changed them into the beautiful saints that they are now. (Of course, that also means that they cannot throw out a bread bag or moldy food but that is another point for another day). No these women, and reduce-reuse-recycle always depended on the women, lived in a time when there wasn't money for new anything. They had to make babies, fix meals, clothe the babies and chop wood (more often than not on the same day). This task consumed them and their bent and quite often broken bodies are testament to the harshness of their lives. This was also the reason why a lot of farmers where I grew up buried three wives before they died. Mormonism is just parallel not serial, I would like to know if Mormon wives in polygamous marriages lived longer.

My point is that labour is never free. Environmentalists always assume that people will forgo luxury and pleasure AT THEIR OWN COST for the warm glow of environmentalism. That gets me to me second point on inconsistency.

Let's take the disposable diaper and assume that Junior soils five diapers a day for a year and half (about 600 days) so that means the "waste load" = 3000 soiled diapers. Each soiled diaper might have the mass of half a kilogram (we had big babies) so that is 1500 kilograms of waste.

Now, let's examine the issue of consistency (and this is where you WILL be offended). I want to address an issue that no man may discuss. As any man has thought (but never said for this is one of those things that cannot be discussed) ... Have any of you ever noticed the similarity between advertisements for diapers and "feminine protection". They use the same words and the same illustrations. When they want to show how absorbent a diaper is they pull out a graduated cylinder with a blue liquid in it and pour it onto the diaper while extolling the "absorbency and dryness" of the item in question. Then the feminine napkin ad comes on and they do the exact same thing. I must confess the idea of a thick blue liquid coming out of my body creeps me out but this wouldn't be the first day that I thanked the good Lord for making me a stand-up pee-er. Any man that has gotten lost in Shoppers and wandered into "The Valley of the Pads" knows that in fact there is an amazing complexity to "feminine protection" that we can never understand or even contemplate. Then of course there is the napkin versus plug debate that again most men can't think about.

In essence a feminine napkin is a small diaper. Now then let's do some math. If we assume that a woman needs "protection" for 13 weeks a year over 40 years (from age 12 to 52). By the way, does anyone else think that the word "protection" in this context is a bit odd? So anyway, if we have a woman using an average of 3 pads a day for 7 days for 13 weeks a year for 40 years we have a total of 10,920 pads. Math rocks.

Now, I know that pads are smaller than diapers but I would assume that 3000 soiled diapers are at least somewhat in the same ballpark as an environmental problem as 10,920 pads. And ask yourself the garbage man's question: which would you rather stick your hand into ... a used diaper or a used pad?

So here we are ... why have the environmentalists not taken on the feminine protection industry in the same way they have the disposable diaper industry? My guess ... PMS.

How do you tell the difference between a woman with PMS and a terrorist?
You can negotiate with a terrorist.

How do you tell the difference between a woman with PMS and a pit bull?
Lipstick.

I got a million of them, I'm here all week ... try the fish.


I mean, imagine you are an environmentalist and you have a choice between making a woman feel guilty about being a lazy mother who uses disposable diapers and telling that same woman just before she needs them that she shouldn't use disposable napkins. Well, no one ever accused the environmentalists of being stupid, just mean and inconsistent. It is always easy to make women guilty and insecure about motherhood ... and it is always heartless.

No, the environmentalist lobby will go a long way towards consistency when they start spreading the news that 13 weeks a year a woman needs to be closeted with cloth napkins and a bucket of hot water. Until that day, let's agree to leave the whole disposable versus cloth diaper debate behind us (if you will forgive a little joke at the end ... oops I did it again there didn't I ... sorry about that shout out for Brittany ... now there is a lady we can all get behind ... ugh that was really bad, maybe I will just settle for Good night and Good luck).

PS. A quote on diapers that I like.

Reason says “Why must I rock the baby, wash its nappies, change its bed, smell its odour, heal its rash? It is better to remain single and live a quiet and carefree life. I will become a priest or a nun and tell my children to do the same.

Christian Faith replies: The father opens his eyes, looks at these lowly, distasteful and despised things and knows that they are adorned with divine approval as with the most precious gold or silver. God with his angels and creatures will smile – not because the nappies are washed, but because they are done in faith.”
Martin Luther, Concerning Married Life