Something New Under the Sun

Every now and then you see something that just makes you go hmmm.

There is an abstract for a paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society that just pokes you in the eye and says "Not only is this amazing chemistry but traditional publishing just doesn't fully show the awesomeness of the reaction".

LINK TO ABSTRACT

At it's simplest level they created a molecule that reversibly breaks a bond when exposed to light. What is cool is the video that goes along with the paper.

Now, photochromic bond dissociation is the cornerstone of the whole discipline of photochemistry (essentially the whole area can be summarized by the statement "Look! We took expensive pure starting materials and shone harsh UV light on them to make complex sewage, we then spent years extracting components from the sewage"). What makes us chemists all giggly about this molecule is the speed of UV capture, bond dissociation and re-association and the fact that the molecule does NOT degrade to sewage. That and the fact that there is the uber cool video showing the whole process.

Why do you care? You know that irritating commercial with the smug near future family that walks outside and their sunglasses immediately turn dark? Now connect the dots and see the bunny. The future is now.

Let the Bitter Howling Begin

If there are any students out there that monitor this blog ... this message is for you. I have decided to allow cheat sheets for my tests and exams in first year chemistry. I know, I know, I fought you guys long and hard on this issue. Our debate always went:

Arguments for Pro -Cheat Sheets:

1) chemistry should be about understanding not memorization
2) memory aids would lower the stress of testing so that the student can do his/her best work
3) creation of the summary sheet is itself an excellent learning process

Arguments for Anti-Cheat Sheets:

1) this course is not a democracy so if I say you need to memorize some basic formulae and logical problem solving sequences suck it up and march like a soldier ... you know what? When I was a student we had to memorize the entire periodic table AND the isotopic masses IN LATIN. I don't care what the professors in OTHER universities are doing, if all the other chemistry professors jumped off a cliff would you expect me to as well? Hmm? Why are you smiling? Did that image make you happy in some way? Well, just for that smarty pants the formal report is due tomorrow ... hand it in just before the unscheduled mid-term.

And at some point in the debate the two sides would descend to childish name calling and secret scheming for retaliation.

So, I have decided to roll over like an old dog. The kicker was a low key investigation at the recent conferences that I attended where the dominant logic was that cheat sheets give the illusion of help but if the student doesn't know the chemistry they will fail anyway.

By the way, I came across this link to a spectacular online periodic table:

LINK TO PERIODIC TABLE

I like this quote for the way it makes the causal link between philiosophy and morality:

"To say that a man is made up of certain chemical elements is a satisfactory description only for those who intend to use him as a fertilizer."
Hermann Joseph Muller

And as I have discovered while on sabbatical ... Jesus may take the wheel but He doesn't do paperwork. My office is a disaster and the lab looks like a combination yard sale - toxic waste dump. I am trying to get things back to "Normal" and I like the attitude in this cartoon:

A Sunday Quote

I came across this quote today in an article that I was reading and I thought a paraphrase to change "poet" to "scientist" would actually be more an accurate reflection of the goal of science in the liberal arts tradition.

"To a poet, nothing can be useless. Whatever is beautiful, and whatever is dreadful, must be familiar to his imagination: he must be conversant with all that is awfully vast and elegantly little."

Samuel Johnson

A Very Odd Chiral Separation

There are symmetry laws written into the basic code of the Universe that we live it. If indeed Nature abhors a vacuum it is positively fanatical about breaking symmetry. The more one reads about them the more one is amazed by how basic symmetry rules control so much of what we know about anything.

Simply put breaking symmetry in any fundamental kind of way is strictly forbidden. When symmetry is broken the consequences are pretty amazing. Indeed, if you read Singh's "Big Bang" it is argued that the Universe itself is the result of a symmetry breaking event.

That said, in my discipline of chemistry the most important symmetry rules are written into the nature of tetrahedral molecular substructures in a phenomenon we call chirality. In terms of geometry, if you have a molecule with any point in it where there are four unique molecular bonds to the same atom there are two distinct spatial arrangements that are possible. For simplicity we call them left handed and right handed. It just so happens that the proteins in our bodies are, in fact, long chains of substructures that all have these tetrahedral atoms (pretty much each one an amino acid). What is remarkable (and amazingly improbable) is that each one of these atoms is the left handed version.

McMurry, 5th Ed.

Why is this amazing or improbable? The universal symmetry laws say that when molecules or atoms that are not left handed or right handed form a tetrahedral atom that there must be a 50:50 mix of left and right handed products. That is why scientists and chemists in particular are obsessed with Escher prints. Escher was an artist that made his money creating images where left and right handed images generated each other ...

In fact the only way we can separate handed molecules is with another handed molecule. The question of course is where the broken symmetry comes from but that is an issue for another day. Suffice it to say that chemists have a unique interest in any sort of process that is capable of sorting left and right handed objects.

Well a new one has surfaced.

It was in the Globe and Mail today that another right sneaker has washed up on a beach in British Columbia. What makes that odd is that the foot was still in it. What makes it odder still is that this is the fourth right foot sneaker with a foot still in it to wash up in recent days.

LINK TO GLOBE AND MAIL ARTICLE

In the absence of a real twisted murderer loose on the West Coast it would appear that this is the result of a natural process of some kind where accidents or suicides result in bodies washing down river and out into the ocean where natural dismemberment results in the feet separating from the bodies but that the right handed foot / sneaker combination follow a different path than the left handed sneakers. The importance of the sneaker is to provide protection for the foot so it stays intact and the natural buoyancy of the sneaker makes the dismembered foot float.

All in all it would appear that a right handed object floating in the ocean is somehow polarized and separated from an equivalent left handed object. The proof of this theory would be to go back to the river source of the bodies and examine the coast in the opposite direction from where the right handed sneakers were found. If this theory is right there should be a stretch of BC coastline where the left footed sneakers accumulate. You heard it here first.

I'm just sayin'.

I Have a Bad Case of Piles

I have always been a "clean desk" kinda guy. I have always believed in organization as a second religion and it is foundational to my day to day work as a professor. On the other hand I really did a "Jesus take the wheel" thing with the ABU Science Department this past year and I let a lot of things slide. That has resulted in several piles of paper on my desk next to the piles of textbooks I need to review for the fall semester courses. I hate piles of paper so i have been methodically plowing my way through them dividing them by priority and interest. At the bottom of one pile I found my 2006 - 2007 student evaluations.

Student evaluations have always been difficult for me. At no other time of my year am I brought so close to the question of why I am here at ABU. At Dalhousie, Saint Mary's and Memorial I had spectacular student evaluations that were always better than the departmental averages. But here at ABU it is very different. In fact, my evaluation numbers are all much worse than the ABU averages even on the question of organization and enthusiasm where I figure I should shine. I know all the rationalizations and explanations about why my evaluation numbers might be poor. But it still brings me back to what am I doing here if the students do not understand or appreciate the effort.

So I read my evaluations and they are pretty much the same as ever. There are some students that clearly "get" what I was trying to do and some other students that clearly hate me on an irrational level (disturbingly they are Science majours). The hate filled group are pretty easy to cope with because it is doubtful that I would be able to reach them anyway. But it is the continuing poor marks and negative comments by the middle group of student that cause me to pause. I guess I need to be more intentional in trying to reach that group of students. The problem is that I feel the issue may not be me so much as the content of the courses that I teach. I have a very clear understanding of the necessary content of my courses and I can't change that without making ABU chemistry courses non-transferable. I don't know, sometimes I just don't know.

And so, I deeply appreciate on a different level the kindness of several students for a card they gave me last fall. At moments like these it really helps. Thanks again.