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.

OK, Congress ought to get rid of antitrust protection for health insurers. While they do that, there are several others that ought to be done.

Personally, baseball ought to lose theirs, too. Special law protection from the 1920s is out of date.

Copyright and Patent law needs an overhaul. Copyrights last too long and just help the publishs and media (meaning record companies and producers/ broadcasters of shows). The focus ought to be on the creators, the inventors of these new ideas. The artists have little means of getting much out of this system, but as long as the law is the way it is, they have little power or say so until they get to be a megahit. Stepen King, J. K. Rowling or Radiohead, Beyonce, or such have little complaint, they can negotiate and have leverage.

Patents are overly long, overly broad and do little for the public’s good. Companies refuse to license, knowing that a monopoly in a needed medicine is megabucks for the CEO and other high executives. Pharma companies recoup their research costs within five years for a high-selling drug, and that recouping covers many failed attemots, too. A patent for decades is just guaranteeing obscene profits.

These laws were meant to be for the good of all by protecting investment in development or creativity. Now the creators, be they an author, a musician, or a scientist at the bench, get little and executives rake in money for year after year.

The best proposal I have heard of is now making its rounds through the Democrats in Congress, that of getting rid of the antitrust protection of the health-insurance industry. If those conceited, onerpaid executive will not give anyone in the system any breaks, then take away their biggest one. Competition and a free market might do more than the public-option option. Insurers collude on rates or carve of areas into exclusive markets – most of the US has only one or two health-insurance providers of any effectiveness. They set rates that are biased, exclude coverage or payment in any way they can, and look only at their profit margins. Get rid of their monopolistic arrogance by getting rid of their legal protection that allows it.

Dick Cheney is now ranting, putting in his wooden nickel ias his two cents, on Obama dithering about Afghanistan troop levels. This comes from one of the Vush policymakers who had seven tears to do something effective there. Instead, from the start, it was not of great importance, not enough to commit to a full-scale war. A modest number of US troops bolstered by those of our allies were sent, but a lot of the warfare was planned to be fought by Afghan allies that we bought into our side. They did a lukewarm try, sometimes cutting deals with the Taliban to carve up regional fiefdoms. Seven years of ineffectual leadeship that only led to a stalemate that never went wholeheartedly after Osama bin Laden or al Qaida or the Taiban. It allowed these militant terrorists to just move around freely and spread their movement more into Pakistan. Cheney ought to have shut up over embarrassment at how badly those seven years went.