I'm glad that someone else came up with the this joke (incidentally, the sign leads one to the Large Animal entrance for the vet school clinic--they see lots of crazy species there). I've been meaning to bring my camera to work so I can take a picture of that for at least a month, but then, I'm lazy.

It's one of the great campus signage jokes, along with the lintel of an agricultural building that has the word MEAT carved in in 2-zillion point font, and the sign for two connected structures which reads "King Hall / Soils Building". J insists the slash got in there accidentally, and the sign is acutally a standalone sentence and a warning about messy royalty. I've started binding off on two long time projects--the second of a blindingly bright pair of socks, and the Mediterranean shawl. Finishing two things at the same time makes the sense of accomplishment that much sweeter.

It may be because the shawl has taken SO long, but I seem to have built a small army of unfinished bits. My "only work on 3 things at once" guideline has stayed mostly intact, but a lonely mitten, a sweater with 1/10th-length sleeves, and a few promises of knit things are weighing me down. Despite my best efforts to avoid knitting guilt, there it is.

Fortunately, the Unfinished Brigade consists of things that will go quickly. So the knitting guilt won't be here for long.

And then I'll have time to play. There's an interesting little thing in the New York Times that will calculate what class you're from (link via Sconnie Sociology). If nothing else, it explains class structure better than I can.

As an undergrad at Ithaca, I did some research with a Cornell prof, and took a Materials Chemistry class my second semester senior year. That same semester I took a sociology course on the US working class. I tried to do a final project on working class scientists and science students, so I stood in front of all my science courses that semester and asked if the poor kids would be willing to get interviewed. Most of the Ithaca kids were from middle-class backgrounds, a few with scientist parents, but they thought the idea was neat and asked me if I had enough interviewees to make a useful paper (I did, barely).

On the other hand, I never got looked at as wierdly as I did by the Cornell engineers when I talked for 30 seconds about the definintion of working class and why I was doing interviews. At the time, I thought this was because they couldn't imagine people coming from families making less per year than their tuition cost.

That might have been it, but now that I've spent some time deep in a reasearch university environment, I've realized that the wierd looks may have had more to do with the fact that I was a physical scientist doing social science research. It took me about a semester and a half here to realize that the engineering kids really don't do anything except science. There are exceptions to that rule, of course, but the exceptions don't contribute to the university culture because we're busy playing Ultimate Frisbee or reading interesting books. (I'm out of town for a while. Amuse yourself with this long essay.) Them Crazy Scientists: Zeptotech

Forget nanotech. It's old.*

There's a group in Caltech that's measuring zeptogram quantities. This is pure insanity. A zeptogram is 10^-21 grams. This is almost beyond the point that I can describe things concretely. A single cell, a sphere with the diameter of a hair, is made up of bajillions of proteins. Your DNA is HUGE on the scale of a protein. One protein molecule--ONE--is on the zeptogram scale.

That sound you hear is my mind being blown.

The way they're measuring this is really neat, too, and isn't even so hard to explain.

Okay. Imagine facing a diving board head-on with a really huge dude on it. He's hopping, sort of, preparing to bellyflop, and the diving board just about reaches into the water on the downswing. A red dot on the end of the board would move waayyy back and forth over the course of time. If you made a graph looking at how far back and forth it went, it'd look something like this:

The next person on the diving board is the huge dude's 4-year old son, jumping off for the first time. He bounces on the board too, but he weighs so much less that the board doesn't go so far back and forth, so the same graph looks more like this:

The board also goes faster, which is important.

If you were laying in the sun with your graphing calculator and happened to know the weight of the man, his son, and anyone else jumping into the water that day, by the end of the day you could see how long it took for the board to go up, down, up and guess a stranger's weight.

This group at Caltech did the same thing, only smaller. They used a very stiff cantilever about a micron long (your hair is 30 microns across, incidentally). They put it in a vacuum so air molecules wouldn't disturb the measurements--that'd be the equivalent of frogs and wombats and seagulls occasionally jumping onto the board. Then they released a smidge of xenon, a heavy noble gas, into the system, which landed on the cantilever and changed the rate at which it vibrated--like the dad joining his already-bouncing son on the diving board.

And they measured that and found that the xenon weighed about 7 zeptograms.

Hot diggity. That's some sweet science.


* Nanotech isn't old. We can't even do it as well as people seem to think we can.

The problem with a scale-dependent, all-encompassing word like "nanotechnology" is that everything involved isn't really at the same scale. If we blow it up a bit: a gram, the basic unit of weight, seems fairly small to a nonscience observer--the weight of maybe half a dime. On the other hand, a meter is pretty big--a child's a meter tall. A liter's somewhere in between--a not-quite-full quart of milk in the fridge. A Newton's pretty small, a very gentle push. A joule has always seemed foolishly tiny to me. It's a thousand times less than the usable energy in a single Cheerio. It's all out of whack with the other sense-measurable fundamental units, but that's my point. A meter-scale technology, like a car, is on the megagram (1000 kilo) scale by weight, probably expending gigajoules of heat as it uses liters of fuel. All over the map.

The group in question used nanotech to measure the zeptogram-scale cluster. Which is amazing. But it's not zeptotech. A zeptometer--I don't even know. At that scale things aren't even things anymore. We have NO control at that level. We hardly even understand that level. So it's not zeptotech. But it is fun. A lace knitting question I hope someone can help with:

You have a big piece of lace. You block the heck out of it. How much can one reasonably expect it to expand? I know it'll depend on the gauge, fiber, etc, I'm just looking for a range. Google and my lace books are not helping, but pure seat-of-the-pants instinct is telling me I can block things 1/3 larger.

I'm wondering because my very rough calculations tell me that, with the round shawl I'm working on, it'll be 40-42 inches across, unblocked, when I run out of yarn. That seems small. I think I'll need to buy a few more ounces, but the amount will partly depend on how much I can stretch this thing.

Of course, buying yarn for this "use up the stash" project is counter-intuitive. But I would certainly use up any yarn I buy ALONG with the stash, so that's not too bad. I'm finding this to be a great advantage to making a round pattern that can be a range of sizes--I can pretty much knit until I get bored or run out of yarn. A chemist friend from my knitting group lent me Alternative Careers in Science: Leaving the Ivory Tower. Not that I'm escaping anytime soon, but it's giving me some good ideas.

The thing is, when I mention my reading to anyone in the sciences, it's as if I just held up a book entitled "Boobies Monkeywiener Fart Boobie Poop". The reaction is some nervous laughter, an averted gaze, and a quick change of subject.

It's interesting the way academic society goes, really; professors want to have a lot of people exactly like them going out into the world and doing exactly what they do. Towards those ends, talk of anything except doing exactly what they do is totally taboo. I don't know if it's insecurity about 20-something years of training spent working towards an incredibly difficult demanding job, or just that the rarefied air of a Research I institution requires so much focus that no one DOES know about other jobs, but it's a strange place to be.

(Taking nothing away from people who DO take the academic path. It's just that I work hard and well with constant, hefty, well-structured doses of discipline from outside myself, or else I sit on the lawn and stare at dandelions all day. Which is a problem right now, in my laid-back lab.) A solution to the ants that hang out in our bathroom has arrived in the shape of a spider, who set its web about an inch from their entrance. I haven't seen a living ant there since his arrival.

Sometimes laziness has rewards.
--------------
I spent a lot of time working on the Mediterranean shawl this weekend. I only have about 8 rows left. Another good long weekend or two should take care of it.

But I'm also sick of it. It's strange; I really enjoy long-term projects until I can look down and think "It won't be long until I'm done with this." Then suddenly I hate everything about it. The shawl manages to be deathly boring yet tricky, so I need to look at every stitch. Because of the way the stitches are squished onto the needles, I can't lay it out and admire the almost-final product. I can hardly see that I've made any progress at all--it looks exactly like this, which was taken nearly two months and dozens of knittig hours ago. It's just an ugly gray Sisyphean lump.

And I need to finish it. Its uncompletedness is dragging me down.

The fact that I'm going home next week is KILLING me, not because I don't miss the family (I do! I do!) but because I can't bring the behemoth along. I've been trying to convince myself I can finish it this week, but no, not unless I don't work. Or sleep. But it's a terrible thing, that it's close enough that I could finish it if I DIDN'T work or sleep. It means that's tempting. Grr. Sprouting peppers! Yay!

It looks like my third attempt at getting sweet peppers going will be successful. FINALLY. There are 3 or 4 little not-quite-up sprouts in the window box.

I think the trick was to psych the seeds out by buying a half-grown pepper plant at the Co-op. A combination of reverse plant psychology and Murphy's Law made them realize it was high time to sprout. The plant I bought is a different type of pepper, so even if everyone thrives I'll have some variety.

I reseeded one of my Morning Glory pots because 3 of the 4 sprouts had meager roots and wilted almost as soon as they sprouted. I think they were sown too shallowly, so the new set I put in deeper. The peas should be up any day now, and I'll plant cucumbers and beans within the next two weeks. Before I do that I'll need to go to the hardware store and get some more soil and pots. I don't know what I was thinking, getting these 10 inch pots for big bushy vegetables.

J's blackberry cane has several flowers, lots of buds, and a quantity of prickers that seems evolutionarily unsound considering that some creature is going to need to interact with it at some point if it's to reproduce. It's still indoors, so I gave it some pollination help by brushing the open faces of the flowers against each other.

I put half the plants out on the patio so far, but after last week's suprise snowfall, I'm keeping a close eye on the weather. I'll probably wait for most of the month with the peppers before I harden them off, since they've started so late. Everything else should be about right. Florida is where shame goes to die.

But I still had a good time at the conference, and learned lots of new words, and saw lots of horrible eyeball slicey-dicey pictures. And I have lots of fodder for more crazy scientist essays. As a sidebar, though, I thought I'd talk a little bit about the way an academic conference is set up, because my mom was asking about it and I realized most people don't go to or even hear of these things.

Crazy Scientist Tricks: The Conference

Going to conferences is one of the more important things that scientists get up to. Like the Zen koan, if you do research and no one knows about it, does it matter? So you write papers for journals and hopefully meet people at conferences.

This was a big conference I went to. How many people? I really don't know. At least 5000. The membership's a smidge over 10,000, so probably less than that. There are smaller ones (the smallest have about 100 people), but the bread and butter of presentations and meeting people in your field is similar.

The setup: A huge monstrous convention center. The biggest room in the place--the kind of place you'd expect to see an RV show or big indoor flea market--that's where the vendors and the posters are, and sometimes where the information-desk type stuff is. Vendors vary a lot depending on what the scientific group is, obviously, but at this one, it was mostly scary eye-specific surgical instruments, New Improved versions of all those toys you see at your optometrist's, drug companies selling their newest drug Eyeballanol, stuff along those lines. Lots of free pens and topic-specific doohickeys (I have a big pile of eyeball swag at home now).

Most of the room's taken up by posters, which I'll get to in a minute. The rest of the convention center, with rooms that range from classroom-sized to small concert hall sized, get used for paper presentations, business meetings, workshops on getting grants funded, that sort of thing. In all the open hallway areas in between, there are usually quite a few 10-12 person tables set up, where people sit and eat, use their laptops, or continue a three-year argument with their academic nemesis.

There are lots of places in the convention center to get horrendously overpriced, calorie laden yet unfilling food.

The place opens up around 7 or 8am. The last talks finish around 5 or 6pm, and if there's a keynote address or something like that, there could be things happening until 9. A long dang day. Most conferences run for 5 days, usually a Monday-Friday so you can enjoy a weekend in the interesting city in which it's being held.

The purpose: you want to tell people how exciting and wonderful your research is, and find out what exciting and wonderful things other people are doing.

You can choose to present a paper (standing up in front of a dark room and giving a 10 minute Powerpoint presentation) or a poster (standing next to a 3x6 ft. poster with all your data on it, explaining it to anyone who looks interested). I like the ability to tailor my discussion to an individual, which you can get giving a poster, but presenting a paper can get you a bigger captive audience, so there's advantages to both. Papers and posters are grouped by subspecialty, so your poster will be next to 20 or 30 related posters, or your paper will be given in a 3 hour block with 10 or 15 people studying similar topics. There are usually quite a few presentations and posters being given simultaneously, so if you're not presenting, there are a lot of choices for what to see.

Presenting: If you're giving a paper, you're given a location and a time. You get to the room before the session starts to make sure your computer works with the AV system. When your turn comes up, you have about 10 minutes to speak, with 2 minutes afterwards for questions.

If you're presenting a poster, you're also given a location and time. In the morning you put your poster up, so people can look at it throughout the day. At the appointed time, you stand around your poster for about 3 hours, waiting for someone to ask a specific question or simply say "tell me a little bit about your work." The work itself is all written up on the poster, so to me, "tell me about your work" translates into "demonstrate to me that someone with a personality did this." So I try to work in some interesting bits that aren't written on the poster--something that didn't work the first time around, a common use for an unusual-sounding technique, a joke about my boss if he's right there and they know him well, that kind of thing. I'm pretty good at that stuff, so my poster went really well.

The rest of the time: You go and listen to other people present their work, look at posters, talk with vendors selling things you use, shmooze with everyone at the career fair, find someone you wanted to ask a more detailed question, eat a greasy sandwich in between paper sessions, or go back to the hotel early and sleep on the beach.

You'd be amazed how tired you can get sitting in a room and thinking all day. I personally have a really hard time sitting in a dark room listening to stuff I half-understand without falling asleep, so I bring the knitting along. I don't have to look down often, I can stop whenever I need to take notes or work out some subtlety, and it uses just enough of my brain to keep me from conking out.

And then you write down the email addresses of people doing REALLY intresting work and go home.