Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Hellfire Preachers and Snarky Scientists

Every science blogger, tweeter (Twitterer?), and opinionator has been talking about the "Cosmos" reboot in the past couple of weeks. I've withheld comment because I was trying to sort through my feelings on it.

On the one hand, it is obviously well done. Tyson is a good science communicator and the special effects are marvelous.

I have two problems: the history sections, and the science community's gloating.

Dr. Tyson is no idiot. The science, as far as I can tell, is rock solid. Their history, where it isn't outright wrong, is highly deceptive. Tyson tries to soften it with small disclaimers, but a soft spoken phrase is hardly enough to dispel Seth MacFarlane's potent animation, which weirdly makes me think of Sunday School felt characters.

If it were just a conversation with scientists, I'd let it slide. But "Cosmos" is being set forth, and was designed as judging by the scripting, as a kind of science evangelism tool. Which I applaud. But it seriously undermines the credibility of the science message when the creators can't seem to be trusted to confer with a historian when writing the history of science. By distorting the most easily checked part of their program, it makes it far too easy for anyone already skeptical of its message to dismiss the rest, even if the rest is actually solid. It's a lot easier to check up on history than to check up on the science. If they couldn't do that right, they should have left it out, whether or not it was in Sagan's original.

The other thing is really getting my goat is the crowing going on in the public face of science, Twitter and blogs. A hashtag I've seen a little too much of is #CreationScience  and it's ilk.

I have a foot in both worlds. I am a faithful Christian who absolutely believes every word in the Apostle's Creed. I take seriously the Great Commision, even if I am particularly terrible at it. I am also a scientist. I think the universe began with the Big Bang, that life evolved on earth (and possibly elsewhere), that dinosaurs walked the earth long before humans and that geologists are perfectly right in the age estimates of the earth. Whenever I can, I try to correct people's misconceptions and make the case for SCIENCE.

So, dear fellow scientists, I say this with love as a sister in Science--who do you think you are going to win over by mockery?

You know that street corner preacher who yells at people who pass by that they are going to burn in Hell, with colorful descriptions of specific tortures? You know how annoying it is to run across these people? Has a single human being not already inclined to the preacher's theology ever repented and converted because they were yelled at?

Fellow scientists, you are that preacher. Every time you make a snarky comment about "Creationists" or "fundamentalists", you are just passing around a mean joke with your own clic. You want to know why 'they' are distrustful of science? Because this is what they see when they go on your twitter page, your blog, your facebook. They see sarcasm and mockery.

I am a old-earth-creationist/theist evolutionist who technically agrees with you and I feel hurt when I read those comments. Should I have a thicker skin? Sure. But making comments like that cuts deep, especially when coming from what I feel is 'my' community.

Do you think you are going to win over anyone by doing this? People on the fence are not likely to tilt to your side because you insulted them, and people who distrust you are going to run.

No one has changed their mind because they were insulted into it. Very rarely on anything that matters may they be discussed into it.

People are loved into change.

This is not likely to be a popular sentiment among you, my dispassionate brethren. You pride yourselves on logic and reason. But you are also deeply, deeply passionate about your research, your area of expertise, your hobbies. You are wonderful, caring people in real life. I rarely, in talking with you, am faced with the same vitriol that I find from you online.

Social media is a powerful tool. We could be using "Cosmos" to be reaching people who will never again set foot inside a science classroom. But if what they see coming from scientists is hatred, why would they want to change their views? Why would they want to associate themselves with you?

Don't be the annoying hellfire street corner preachers of science

Sunday, March 23, 2014

Trying to Not become my grandmother

I am weird about my kitchen. By weird I mean, weirdly protective of it. By protective I mean possessive. Which is to say, besides myself there are about 4.5 other people on this earth I trust to use my kitchen without my right eye getting twitchy. The half is my husband, who I trust to make tea, coffee and microwave things.


The kitchen is my domain. Nearly every other room in the house includes compromises with someone else. If I am not asleep, that is where you are most likely to find me. It is my artist studio, where I create new food, improve old food.

I also know that kitchens are really common areas and to ban people from using it is weird and awkward. My grandmother never let anyone use her kitchen. Ever. My dad never even learned how to make a pot of coffee while he was growing up, and when we visited as kids we knew that we were not allowed to raid her fridge or even get ourselves a glass of water.

I don't want to be my grandmother is this regard. I really don't. I actively invite people to get themselves drinks, to help themselves to whatever food might be on the counter, and I suppress the urge to do it myself.

But it's hard. It is physically stressful for me to have most people doing  things in my kitchen. Occasionally its because they are doing something bad to my good knives, my good cutting board, or pans. More often it is for little, inconsequential things, like putting the butter in the fridge or putting something away in the wrong drawer. Easily fixable, no big deal things that send my blood pressure skyrocketing.

I know that these things are objectively no big deal. I don't say anything when we have guests over because I know it makes me look ridiculous, and I am trying not to be my grandmother.

But if someone went and rearranged your computer files, or craft box, or your toolkit, wouldn't you get twitchy?

Friday, March 21, 2014

A Hectic Week

This week has been a rather hectic week for me, though not in crazy-running-around kind of way.

Teaching has been more time consuming and emotionally difficult because we had a series of schedule mishaps (including a snow day), combined with a class that seems to need a little more hand holding through the topics than usual. The result is I have to spend more time prepping, and a lot more time grading.

If a quiz is done correctly, it is usually obviously correct.

When it is wrong, it can be obviously wrong (blank page, doodles, completely unrelated equations, etc) or very very creatively wrong, or completely wrong in execution, but correct in the theory, or the execution is done completely correctly, but with the wrong theory. It can be very difficult to grade the creatively wrong quizzes.

In addition to teaching, on Wednesday, I volunteered to host a prospective grad student for the afternoon and evening. It was a lovely time, and I enjoyed it very much, but it did throw my usual schedule a little out of whack.

And now we are awaiting the arrival of the flight bearing my mother-in-law, who will be visiting a week. Her flight is unfortunately delayed, and we aren't sure if we should try to catch some sleep, or stay awake in case things change. We seem to have defaulted to the later.

A fitting end to a hectic, but good, week.

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Perspective is a strange thing...

I'm a short woman. I haven't grown an inch since I was about 12, and I actually lost an inch because I spent a good chunk of my early teens lying down in bed, which decompressed my spine and I was very briefly five-foot-two. Standing normally I'm five foot, if I draw myself up to my full height I'm five-foot-one. This is several inches shorter than the average American woman; I'm so short 'petite' clothes designed for the 5'-5'4" woman need hemming for me to wear them.  The world is the totally wrong size for me. The only chairs that my feet touch the ground in are antiques and children's. I can't rest my foot on the floor of the car and press the gas pedal unless I'm in at least a 2 inch heel.

All this to say, I know I'm short.

After years of avoiding heels (you would too if you lived with vertigo/dizziness for years and years) I have finally started wearing them, because they make it easier to drive/reach things/write on a chalkboard, starting with low heels which didn't change my perspective too much. Then last week, I made the final leap and bought some 4 inch stilettos. In the store, things didn't look so different.

I couldn't believe how different my house looked and felt being 4 inches taller.

My first thought was "So this is how normal people see my house".

I also suddenly realized why no one understands when I complain about desk and table heights. They are a perfectly good height for normally-height-ed people.

Absolutely none of this should have come as a shock.

It was absolutely shocking.

And it made me a lot more sympathetic to people who just don't understand when I explain an experience. It is incredibly difficult to see from a perspective other than your own, unless given a chance to literally do so. I can't wait for realistic virtual reality  machines to see what being able to experience, as close to in the flesh as possible, the life of another does to humanity.

Enlightenment through shoes. Who knew?

Monday, March 17, 2014

Everyday Optics: Cosmetic Mirror

Last week, while helping a friend study for the qualifying exam, I posed him this question--explain how a cosmetic mirror works.

For those of you who have never used one, a cosmetic mirror is a mirror that creates a magnified image. Usually they are small and hand held so you can use them to apply things like eye liner and see what you are doing.

I am embarrassed to say, while we had the right instincts in this matter, it took us a day to figure out how to do the ray tracing to prove we were right, so I figured I'd make a blog post out of it.

To start with, let's examine the three types of basic mirrors. There is the flat mirror, which is the kind that hangs over your bathroom sink and is the kind of mirror pretty much everyone is familiar with. It can not magnify, either positively (make it bigger) or negatively (make it smaller). So that one's out.
Don't you love my white board illustrations?


There is the convex mirror, which is bowed outward and is the kind you see in gas stations as a security measure. They create smaller, distorted images of whatever is in front of it. So that's out.

No? Too bad.

Lastly, there is the concave mirror, which bows inward. This is the  most complicated mirror, because what it does depends on what region you are in, as shown below.

I do need new markers though....

So this is the kind of mirror we need, and we know we need to be inside the focal point for this to work. That's fine, because you are usually holding this close to your face anyway. However, the image that it creates is imaginary, and that's the part that was tripping us up while we were drawing the ray diagram.

As you can see, to demonstrate the effect we know occurs, we need to trace partially real rays, and partially imaginary rays. The imaginary rays are what we perceive happens, the virtual image that is created 'in' the mirror.
Diagram a la Hecht

So there you have it. How a cosmetic mirror works. Incidentally, this also applies to the image created  in bowl of spoon. See if you can find the focal point!

~AMPH

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Great is the mystery of the fridge

Life was weird today. But perhaps nothing quite so weird as my lunch missing from the break room fridge.

Now, I know that this sort of thing is not uncommon is some places, but you have to understand something about this particular fridge.

Nothing leaves this fridge.

When I came to the program, there was a three year old carton of eggnog in the fridge. It lived there for another year after I got there.

Chinese leftovers, hot pockets, soy sauce, this and much more have lived in that fridge for months without molestation.

I leave my yogurt in there overnight, one night, as I frequently do so I don't have to make a time-costly detour on teaching mornings, and it vanishes.

What gives?


Monday, March 10, 2014

Everyday Optics: Rearview Mirrors

I have been helping some friends study for the qualifying exam lately, and part of that has been coming up with problems for them to ponder and answer. As I've done this, I've realized just how much optical phenomena surround us everyday, and just how much of it can be treated in terms of simple geometrical optics. (Why I didn't discover this when I myself was studying is anyone's guess).

Take, for example, your rearview mirror. If you drive, you know this mirror is a good friend. And if you do a lot of night driving, you know that moving that little lever on the bottom forward means you don't have to be blinded by the headlights of the guy behind you. But you probably have not thought about why that works. You are just thankful it does when the idiot behind you has his brights on. 

The way that this works is simple, cool and demonstrates the usefulness of basic optics.

First, let's look at the case of the normal, daytime mirror. In this situation, it works like any other mirror. You have a piece of silvered glass (glass with a highly reflective material on one side) that is angled so that it directed light from objects directly behind the driver's right shoulder into the driver's eyes. 
Yes, I do illustrations on my whiteboard.


From an optical standpoint, there are two reflective surfaces or interfaces. Reflections occur wherever there is an index mismatch, and the stronger the mismatch, the stronger the reflection. How much reflection occurs can be found using the Fresnel Equations.  In the case of a rearview mirror, we have a air/glass and a glass/reflective coating interface. One other thing to note is that rearview mirrors are not like your bathroom mirror, which is made of planar glass. Rather, rearview mirrors are prismatic, which is to say if you cut one in half from top to bottom, you would notice that the glass is ever so slightly trapezoidal, like this:


This allows you to choose which reflection you want to use--the silvered surface reflection for daytime driving, where everything is the same brightness, thanks to sunlight.


Or the first glass surface at night, where you just want enough light to know someone is behind you, because you aren't going to get any kind of detail from the reflected image anyway. Notice that the light still is reflecting off the silvered surface, but now it is being reflected at the ceiling. In fact, if you accidentally leave it in the night position during the day, you'll notice a very faint reflection of what's behind you, and a much stronger reflection of your car ceiling.

Behold! PhysicsGal in her minivan, parked safely in her garage.
Alright, I admit it. Geometrical optics is kinda cool and useful. Only took me...6 years to figure that out? I think I'm ashamed of myself. 


Friday, March 7, 2014

Puzzles are a lot like research

Recently I decided Dear Husband and I should take up jigsaw puzzles. It's a good hobby. It's relatively inexpensive, time consuming, can be done together, and it yields pretty pictures when its all done. Actually, its mostly the latter.

Our house has a lot of big, blank walls painted a cream color. Some have holes from where the previous owner hung pictures. We did not come to the house with a lot of pictures, and we are too frugal to buy real paintings. We could buy reproductions, but even those are somewhat pricey and it feels cheap to us.

 So until we can afford/find/agree on original art, jigsaw puzzles seem to be a good compromise. They are obviously reproductions. They are cheap. And, again, they provide hours of entertainment.

There are many ways of going about completing puzzles with lots of little pieces. There is the "Find all the Edge Pieces" method, which finds the borders and works its way inward. There is the "Hunt and Peck" method, seemingly preferred by my husband which starts with just putting together any pieces that fit. My method could be called "Divide and Conquer" or "Painstaking", which involves dividing up the pieces by come features (color and/or pattern) and focusing on getting all those pieces together. It involves choosing a piece, and trying every other piece to go with that piece until you have built up that entire section.

It is very slow going at first, but as you build up the sections you can begin to eliminate pieces from consideration on the ground of them not being the right shape, being too long, too short. Is it the fastest method? Maybe not. But it involves a lot less trying the same piece in the same spot over and over.

As I went, I realize that this is the same way I attack research (and most of my problems). Slowly and methodically. I think it confuses my PI sometimes why I insist on keeping constants, for example, running around and doing things piece by piece instead of lumping things together cleverly. I don't do clever lumping. My brain doesn't work like that.

It takes me time to get going. I am not fast at the outset. But I get faster and faster as I go because I can see pattern emerge specifically because I didn't lump things at the outset.

It's kind of nice for me to realize that I do have internal consistency in this. And it's nice to see the (more) tangible result of my methods in puzzles, even when the research is slower than molasses in January.

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Shrove Tuesday

Today is Shrove Tuesday. You may know it better as Mardi Gras, or "Fat Tuesday". It marks the last day in the season after Epiphany and the last day before the season of Lent. For people who are not Christian, or who do not observe the liturgical year, it's excuse to party on a Tuesday, or party all week long depending on where you live.

If you are liturgical and you do observe Lent in an actual time of reflection and repentance kind of way, not just in the I-can't-eat-this-today kind of way, Shrove Tuesday is a day to prepare both spiritually and potentially physically for Lent. The 'shrove' part of the name comes from the fact that people used to do a pre-Lent confession as part of their preparations.

For me this involved getting rid of or hiding a lot of the sweets in my house, and putting all the alcohol away. Our assistant Rector has inviting the parish to join in a kind of fast this Lent, focusing on our relationship to food and how it can help or hurt our relationship to others and to God.  The idea is to eat simply, rather than focusing on giving up specific things for specific days or trying to not eat at all.

My relationship to food is complicated. It's a hobby, a necessity, an indulgence, a comfort, a source of pride and a means of love. I'm going to be trying to use this Lent to try and weed out some of my more selfish motives around food, and try to refocus on the ways God provides for me, and on using my skills to benefit others, not just myself.

If you are planning on observing some sort of fast this Lent, whether of food, entertainment or something else, I hope it helps you draw closer to our Lord and Savior. If not, enjoy all the extra ice cream.


Monday, March 3, 2014

What is color?

This year's Flame Challenge was to explain what color is. Never heard of the Flame Challenge? It's a really cool contest started three years ago by the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science. Yes, Alan Alda from M*A*S*H the tv show. The contest asks scientists to explain, at the level of an 11-year-old but without oversimplifying, a basic question. The first year asked "What is flame?" and the second year asked "What is time?". I really recommend you go watch the winning videos--they are awesome.

I would have loved to enter the contest this year, but learned about it too late. The written entry had a word limit of 300 (WAY too short), while the video had a 6 minute limit (into which you can cram more like 1000 words). Next year, I'm going to look for it early so I can actually through together a video.

But I thought there was no reason to do a blog post on the topic!

What is color? Well, that kinda depends on whether you are talking about colored light or a colored object. Because while the answers are similar, they aren't the same. Let's start with what makes colored light, and an analogy!

You've all seen (and probably been forced to learn at some point) a musical instrument. I learned to play clarinet at an earlier point in my life, so I'll use that for this analogy. You know that if you hold certain keys down and blow into the clarinet  (thus vibrating the column of air in said instrument) you get a certain note. If you hold down different keys, you'll get a different note. But unless your clarinet is WILDLY out of tune, you will never ever get a middle C out of the soprano F fingering. What's happening is that by holding some holes open and others closed you are causing the column of air to vibrate at a different frequency, which we perceive as musical notes.

While sound is vibrations in air, light is vibrations in  the electromagnetic field created by electrons jumping around in an atom. It works like this. All atoms have distinct energy levels that their electrons are allowed to inhabit. The electrons are not allowed to be any where but those energy levels.
You may  be on any level you have the energy to reach, but never anywhere in between

Normally, electrons exist in their ground state, or lowest energy level. To get to the next level, they need an extra kick of energy.




Once they are up there though, they can't stay for long. Very few of the non-ground state energy levels are stable, so the electron only gets to hang out a short while before it needs to fall back to the ground state. Only problem is it can't exist in the ground state with this extra energy, which it conveniently gives off as a photon, or a burst of vibrations, in the electromagnetic field. How much energy it needs to give off, which is determined by how far it needs to 'fall', tells you at what frequency it vibrates. Each frequency has its own color attached to it. So if you only have one type of atom, you are only going to be able to get a few colors, or spectral lines.Your eyes don't see them as individual lines, but as a blended single color, just like your ears don't hear individual notes in a chord.

How an non-light-source object  has a color is different. Lets imagine we have a light bulb that gives off white light. That is, it has electrons giving off photons of many different wavelengths across the whole spectrum, which we perceive as white. You could think of this like an orchestra warming up. You just hear a cacophony of noise; to our eyes, a 'cacophony' of light looks white. Then that light strikes an object--lets say a red brick fireplace. All the photons of every color imaginable strike the brick. All the photons that are purple, indigo, blue, green, yellow and orange get absorbed by the atoms in the brick. They cause the atoms to vibrate and if you shone enough light on the brick for long enough, the bricks would get hot (think about a brick patio in the summer time). The red photons don't get absorbed though. They aren't the right frequency to be absorbed, so they get spat out in all directions. The photons that happen to get spat out in the direction of your eye strike your retina, and your brain goes "Hey! That thing is red!".

And that's how we get things with color. If its a light bulb, it's a particular color because that's the color (frequency) that it's electrons give off vibrations at. If it is just a plain old object, it's a particular color because its electrons don't vibrate at that color.

Isn't physics fun? Or should I say, phun?

Saturday, March 1, 2014

Homemade Mallowmars

Mallowmars, if you have never heard or tasted one, is a chocolate dipped, marshmallow-topped cookie that is about the size of a girl scout cookie, and can only be found in colder weather in many of the United States. Incidentally, there are a million variations on this cookie and no one knows who invented it.

Growing up in New Jersey, we couldn't always find them, so they were (and are) are a real treat. So when I wanted to make something nice for my mother, I thought I would make homemade mallowmars, because if I'm going to do something, I may as well do it in the most labor intensive way possible, yes? Or it's because it allows me to make cookies, candy and chocolate dip something all for one purpose.

Making these things is time consuming, but not 'difficult' in the way that making a baked alaska is difficult. It takes a lot of steps, but no one step is tricky.

Step 1: make the cookie base. I used a half batch of the "Joy of Cooking" sugar cookie dough, using an 1.5 inch cookie cutter, and it yielded a 100 bases.



You want to have extras, for testing at every step and to allow for failure (cookie cracks, flips over in the marshmallow stage, chocolate coating doesn't cover evenly). I had about a 10% loss  from start to finish, but your results may vary depending on the number of people who insist on taste testing and your ability to handle things with fingers covered in culinary superglue.

Step 2: Pipe on marshmallow. This requires some hand strength, or ingenuity. Preferably both. This is the biggest 'cookie down!' part, because if the cookie lands marshmallow side down, (as you can see happened to two in this picture) there's no hope for that one. I use Alton Brown's recipe, which has never failed me. Actually, I don't think I've ever had a recipe of his fail.


Step 3: After letting the marshmallow set for  4 hours, melt some chocolate. I like Ghiradelli 60% cacao chocolate chips, because they melt the best to give a not too thick, even coating and keep the temper the best. I melt them in a double boiler, because it yields the smoothest result.


Step 4: Dip the cookies in the chocolate, let sit overnight to set. Enjoy!


They may not be as pretty as the ones that come out of a box, but they taste a whole lot better. And totally worth the effort.