Fetzthechemist’s Weblog

Having gone through undergrad and grad school in the ’70s, I had to take analytical courses where you learned about wet chemistry – titrations of all sorts, precipitation reactions to remove interferences or in the single case of Ag(I) actually using it for chloride, iodide, cyanide determinations, organic derivatization for colorimetric analusis (dinitrophenylhydrazines for ketones and aldehydes comes to mind), et cetera. My research advisor in grad school, Lockhart B. Rogers, had come through in the 30s, so that was the analytical of his first learning and he made sure we knew it on cumes and included a section in one of his courses that was strictly that sort of thing.

Over the intervening thirty years, I see more emphasis on purely instrumental analysis as the learning. I know if you teach one thing more, something else must drop off the curriculum…..except professors ought to still require grad students to know some of that for cumes. But I see less and less chemistry in the knowledge base of younger chemists. I find that both sad and worrying. All that sort of knowledge helps tie all those seemingly arcane factoids of general chemistry into part of a cohesive understanding of all of chemistry. Inorganic and organic chemists learn their area, but in analytical they are mainly at a users-level in understanding. If analytical chemists are losing their knowledge of the chemistry, the applications get narrowed and the problems inherent get lost and there is a reliance on less valid information.

What to do? I guess at every point, a good chemist ought to still be learning the applicable chemistry to whatever she or he is doing. It is not just all about button pushing.

Being a chemist, I dabble a little at cooking. My cooking skills are a little beyond basic or rudimentary. Following recipes is a lot like doing organic or those labs in school where you follow a set of directions using certain ingredients. I prefer making simpler dishes – a lot are those things commonly called comfort food. Among my favorite areas, especially in autumn and winter, are soups and stews. I made a batch of split pea and ham soup a couple of days ago. Next up might be beef and barley soup. Other common ones are beef stew, New England clam chowder, chicken noodle, cream of mushroom. Ones that are less common are a cream of roasted garlic, a gumbo that is an amagam of half a dozen recipes I got throughout Louisiana – including okra (that’s why it is called gumbo!( and file’, a smoked sausage, potato, and cabbage soup, and chili (like many, chili is a common stew, but my recipe makes it special). I have two or three good recipes books for soups and stews and usually try a few in the colder months.

When growing up, my dad’s older sister called today Armistice Day, the original origin of Veteran’s Day was to honor those killed in World War I. It grew quickly into honoring all war death and then all who had served in the military. In our house it was not a big deal. My dad was in the Army for much of my youth, so it was a day where we went to see a parade where he work (whatever “Fort” he was stationed at at that time). Memorial Day was a bigger event, I think because it was in late spring or early summer weather. The bases often had more elaborate events. When at Fort Ord, there was a mock invasion with landing craft, tanks, mortars, and for a kid of elementary school age in the era before the Vietnam War got a blackeye, that was very cool.

In our house, we were ingrained to respect military people. Not nly was my dad one, but so were most of his friends. One days like today, we’d see Sergeant So-and-so in full dress uniform with all the insignia, patches, and medals. We knew early on what a Distinguished Service Cross, Bronze or Silver Star were. We knew about the Congressional Medal of Honor – one of the books I got back then for a borthday or Christmas was was stories of CMOH winners. They were more important than officers with the leafy clusters or birds or stars.

If I meet someone today who is in the military, they get that same respect. I know what sacrifices just being in the armed forces is and how it changes family and personal responsibilities and behaviors. Ironically, at times I hear some conservatives claiming the ground of patriotism, as if being liberal means a person cannot understand loyalty and faith in one’s country and its principles, as if duty, honor, and country were only felt by the right wing, My dad was a moderate conservative, a populist who grew up in a bigoted Jim Crow South and knew that his fellow soldiers were rated on their sense of duty, bravery, and discipline beyond any differences in skin color or heritage.

Veteran’s Day, to me, is about remembering those who forsake or forsook personal status to do something for everyone’s good.

I am in the midst of putting together a short course on water analysis. Over the years, I did different areas of this field, so a lot of the assembling is refreshing and gathering details. Some areas in water analysis are old old-school, wet chemical methods developed fifty or more years ago. A lot of methods for trace metals, cations, and anions based on precipitation, colorimetry, titrations with redox or pH indicators. Luckily, I actually did a moderate amount of those things by choice. My research advisor had gone through grad school and his early career was in that era, so he taught a lot of that in his classes. I think much of that science has disappeared or is only thought of as freshman-level lab stuff.

Another interesting aspect is that water can be a horrendous matrix if humic acids and such are in them (runoff and other waters). Humic acids are colored brown and absorb pretty much across the spectrum. They have some inherent fluorescence. There are many, many chemical functionalities. They smell bad when concentrated.

So the course is an interesting way to reconnect with a whole area of analytical chemistry – electrochemistry, flow injection, and some other arcane areas are part and parcel in water analysis.

When The Da Vinci Code came out, I thought it was an overhyped potboiler. I like action book sometime. I used to read Tom Clancy in his earlier days before fame dulled his pen. But the hype about Da Vinci Code was because it was percieved as being anti-Catholic. So I wanuted a couple of years, read it and the prequel Angels and Demons. A&D had not created much response, I guess because the Catholics were more heroic than villanous. The two are good reads with intricate plots and a lot of homework done on symbology and history to make the stories cohesive. So I awaited the sequel.

It is also well put together and flows. The only downside is that Dan Brown seems to spend more time, especially at the end, moralizing about virtues. But it is a good fit with the other two. The heroes this time are the Masons and some debunking of their myths are a main theme.

I live in the part of the San Francisco bay area that is where the members of Green Day lived and grew up. (It also was home to Les Claypool of Primus fame.) So I heard on and on about the local band that was making a splash, becoming famous, becoming a hit group, et cetera. The plaqce Billy Joe Armstrong’s mom works at now is just a couple of miles down the stree and I eat breakfast there once in a while. Rod’s Hickory Pit, the now-defunct restaurant where she used to work in Vallejo, has another place about a block from where I first lived here. Some of Green Day lived in my suburb, even.

Not being a jump on the bandwagon type as far as my musical tastes, I never went out of my way to listen to any of their records. I was the same way about Oasis, the “new Beatles”. The press hype just seemed too big to really warrant listening. I always expect disappointment on such band.

Well, on my recent trip to South Carolina, I was awake late suffering from the jet lag of being three hours earlier compared to California. Flipping through the hotel’s cable channels, I caught a repeat of Saturday Night Live, which I rarely watch – after the 70s and 80s versions with Chevy Chase, Dan Ackroyd, John Belushi, Bill Murray, et alia, the newer ones just seem lame most of the time. This show had Green Day as the musical guest. Their two or three sings were pretty good, at times reminding me of Brit Pop bands like Blur or Oasis (yeah, they are pretty good after my earlier procrastination on them, too).

So I went out and bought Dookie, American Idiot, and 21st Century Breakdown. I like them. They are a good listen despite the ever-present talk of them here.

One of the things that I continually see is that people who are past their grad school and post-doc days think that they are also past having to be involved in career development. It seems that the further into a career that people go, the less they think that they need to pay attention to their careers.

If career development is defined as planning the future steps in your career, maximizing your performance in the current phase you are in, and learning the skills needed to do well in those future roles, and then career development must be a constant throughout your career.

When you are early in a career, you stress learning the tools of the science you do – the techniques, instrumentation, the literature, and you learn how to use them well. But you also learn how to speak, how to write technical papers, how to network. You plan for the next phase of being a newly-minted scientist by getting better at these tasks.

As a newly-minted scientist, you hone these skills. You network more widely and start to diversify your scientific interests. You learn the rudiments of other fields in order to branch out and to collaborate. You start learning organizational skills by becoming involved in your local scientific societies and symposia. You are building to be seen as an established scientist.

As an established scientist, your role has grown bigger. In industry, you are now supervising others. In academia, your group is larger and works on more than one or two projects. You also cannot afford to spend as much time in the lab in either venue. You are learning to delegate and to assess others work to do your ideas. You are now being asked to write review articles and book chapters and to chair and assemble sessions at conferences.

The growth curve leads to the next phase of being a recognized scientist, one who not only is looked upon as a part of the research community in her or his field, but is relied upon to be a leader both scientifically and in the workings of science. You might be writing or editing a book, or be sitting on the organizing committee of a conference or on a journal’s board. People seek your opinions. You become more of a manager than a scientist, yet you manage both the science and the scientists in your organization. You are often asked to be an invited speaker.

In each of these phases, either stronger skills or new ones are needed in order to perform well. Your abilities to speak and write, to connect with people, to organize and manage are all stretched more and more. You learn to do these things better and more efficiently. Your time in each is always in short supply. In some cases, your skills get better through experience. Speaking becomes second nature. Reading and assessing the literature or internal reporting from your group becomes easier and quicker. You no longer worry about every minute detail in planning since you delegate and rely on the work of others. You become more effective as a trainer and teacher so that some tasks can be performed by others.

If you do not do these, you will learn that the Peter Principle is real; of leveling out at the point your incompetencies limit your capabilities.

Curious about the grad student perspective. Yay or Nay? Pestigious or Fluff? I would like to know whatever is the perspective from the student side.

Religious sectarian violance has always seemed to be a paradox. People who profess to be religious and follow a creed will kill those of another faith. That in itself is a strong theme in the world’s history, but one subcurrent is when those within one faith kill others who also are of that faith, but are in a different sect. Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland and Orthodox and Catholics in the former Yugoslav nations are two examples. A current one is the Muslim militants in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq who blow themselves and other Muslim worshippers at mosques.

This is very puzzling since the main professing of Islam is that there is only one god, Allah. Period. This one all-seeing, all-knowing, judging god must see these bombings of people worshipping. Do the bombers really think that their god likes and accepts this desicration of his mosques? Will the merciful Allah care for the innocent souls of those blown up and judge their murderers?

This year has been unusually cool in norther California. In the San Francisco Bay Area where I live, you usually get about 3 or 4 weeks of hot weather, 90 degrees F or higher. These are scattered throughout the months from May through early September in 2, 4, 4, or 5 day clusters. The weather alternates between those and much cooler ones. This year there were maybe 10 hot days.

In September the weather changes. The fog from the Pacific stops coming in shore and there are long stretches of hot days, maybe for weeks on end. This hot period usually lasts through the middle of October and often even later. But this year, this “Indian summer” was nonexistant, maybe we had two days, so it seemed like a regular warm period. But now the days are cool and there have been rainstorms. This is the November/ December pattern.

When I was in Charleston at the ISPAC conference, I heard similar stories from Canadians and Europeans. Could this be a global cool year? Are the climate forecast at least temporarily off? Maybe so. I wonder if the models did not account for the temporary influx of coler icemelt water as the polar caps thaw.