Blue

I noticed the "Blue" microphone and blue vase on my desk today.  The serendipity tickled me so much, I had to take a photo.  This was going to be my Wordless Wednesday post, but I have a few thoughts about Blue.

Blue and orange is one of my favorite color combos, and I don't even care for the Broncos or football in general.

Coincidentally, Is Now the Bluest Time in Art? appeared on the art blog, Hyperallergic, yesterday. Martin Bellander analyzed 100 randomly-selected pixels of images of 130,000 paintings gleaned off the web and plotted color prevalence vs. time.

Visualization of the colors of 94,526 paintings from between 1800 and 2000 (courtesy Martin Bellander)

Isn't this interesting?  What's going on?  Can you tell when synthetic "Prussian" blues were invented?  Or when travel to Afghanistan became more or less perilous?  (This makes sense if you read Color: A Natural History of the Palette.)  Are our aesthetics changing in response to technical and market advances or vice versa?

Aside:

I have mentioned previously that I married a spectroscopist and that we met across a laser table at Berkeley. Most people don't know what a spectroscopist is. The short answer is that they infer stuff about stuff based on the color(s) of light that the stuff absorbs or gives off.  It's basically applied quantum mechanics.

You may have noticed that we visit art museums a lot. We talk about both the aesthetic and technical aspects of color more than most families.

In defense of Home Ec 3

I realize that Home Ec has become unfashionable in feminist circles, but it is historically important as a career path into science for so many talented women in prior generations.  Universities were willing to accept women in some departments only because they had viable career paths in industry working in food and textile sciences.

Make no mistake about it.  The nutrition science major at UC Berkeley is among the most challenging ones on campus.  Nutrition students have to learn everything required of biochemistry majors, take all pre-med requirements and then take nutrition classes on top of it.

I read in The Queen of Fats that the reason it took so long for other labs to replicate/confirm UC Berkeley's research in omega-3 fatty acids and cholesterol ratios was because no other food science department had access to the special centrifuges at Lawrence Berkeley Labs.  (They were a holdover from the Manhattan Project.)

Women who were interested in studying chemistry could sneak into their local universities as Home Ec majors and take everything that chemistry majors take.  Then they can apply at more enlightened universities further from home for graduate studies in chemistry.

Topologically-inclined women also studied Home Ec so that they could work as pattern-makers--an engineering discipline that pays much better than fashion design.  I was delighted to read that David Hockney's mother had been a pattern-maker in her youth.  I was less delighted when he wrote about how she was harassed into quitting by a colleague who was jealous/threatened by her superior abilities.  She continued to sew for her family.  When Hockney first sold a painting, he purchased a better sewing machine for his mom (along with more paint for himself) with the proceeds.

I've written about sewing and topology before, and will do so in the future, but let's get back to my intended subject.

I initially applied to graduate school to chemistry departments as a physical chemist.  I was particularly taken with spectroscopy and the study of reaction dynamics.  There is something so intellectually satisfying when you go from the micro world of quantum mechanics, compute the available energy before and after chemical reactions according to quantum rules, and then come out with a pretty accurate prediction for bulk reaction rates.  It's better than magic.

Science departments commonly fly prospective graduate students to visit in person after acceptance.  "Prospectives" receive schedules that provide time to meet with students and professors in their research field of interest.

My undergraduate research advisor, who had guided me through the application process, expressed surprise to see Dick Bernstein on my UCLA visit schedule.  He thought that Bernstein was no longer taking graduate students in preparation for retirement.  Did that mean they had to pad out my schedule because not enough active professors were interested in me?  Was that a bad sign?

No matter.  This gave me 30 minutes alone with the co-author of Molecular Reaction Dynamics and Chemical Reactivity and co-creator of Surprisal Analysis (the degree with which we are thermodynamically surprised by an experimental outcome).  I mean, who wouldn't want to spend time alone with someone with the imagination and humor to get IUPAC to accept Surprisal as an official chemical term?  Calculating surprisal indices is one of the funnest things imaginable.  But, it does take a lot of math and hard work in lab to get to the point where you can calculate one.

At the appointed time, I went to his office.  I asked why he was on my schedule even though he was winding down his research lab.  He said that my personal statement reminded him so much of his childhood, he wanted to meet me.  One of my science heroes wanted to meet me!

My personal statement was personal.  I broke the rules about not bringing any additional attention to my gender.  I wrote about staring out the window as a child and wondering why the sky was blue (common enough for spectroscopists).  But, I also wrote about learning to love chemistry in the kitchen with my first science teacher, my mother.  I learned about oxidation and chelation by squeezing lemon juice on bananas or in tea.  My mom told funny stories about her chemistry lab in nursing school and encouraged me to take science classes whenever possible.

His extended biography showed more parallels.  We both double-majored in math and chemistry.  His mother sewed and ran a dress shop.  And, we both puttered around in the kitchen with our moms, learning chemistry and being surprised.

I highly recommend reading both the extended biography published by the National Academy Press after a conference to celebrate his life and contributions and his NY Times obit.

You never know where Home Ec will lead you.  I'm certainly glad that it led me to meet this extraordinary man.

Q & A

Mardel tagged me with this Q & A. I hope she gives me partial credit. My bedside table yesterday morning.

For the new question, how about "What's on your kitchen counter?"
The Neuro Fuzzy rice cooker makes perfect quinoa on the brown rice setting. I also soak and cook beans with it using the delay timer feature. I have no idea what the manufacturer means by Neuro Fuzzy, but I noticed a lot of computer scientists use this rice cooker. LOL

The Neuro Fuzzy® Rice Cooker & Warmer features advanced Neuro Fuzzy® logic technology, which allows the rice cooker to 'think' for itself and make fine adjustments to temperature and heating time to cook perfect rice every time.

Quinoa recipes on NPR.

The Black Swan 2

Mark told me that, like the black swan, there are no Priuses sporting "W" stickers in the country. I saw a silver Prius with a "W" sticker today heading southbound on Anza. The driver then made a left turn (eastbound) on Torrance Blvd. It exists!

From the archives:
The Black Swan

Bicycle built for four

What does a quad, a bicycle built for four, look like?
The captain (usually the largest and/or most experienced rider) sits in the front. Notice that the smallest rider (a five year old) has a child stoker conversion kit that brings the pedals up higher so he can reach.

In another small world moment, we ran into this particular family at the rally after losing track of them a dozen years ago. They were our next door neighbors on Pearl Street, in Boulder. Actually, they became our next door neighbors because I told my classmate, the captain pictured above, about the vacancy next door. His wife (then girlfriend) and I bonded when she immediately hung up a clothesline and then told her mother that her next door neighbor used one, too.

We lost track of each other when he went off to do a postdoc and I moved to LA. Unbeknownst to us, they had moved near LA so he could teach at the same college as Writing Maternity and Hopeless But Not Serious, which is also the alma mater of one of my grad school roommates. Very small world indeed, especially considering the small size of the college.

See a cute video of a two year old peddling with a child stoker kit and more pictures of families riding quads and triples here.

(Does the dweeby guy checking voicemail on his cell phone at the RH edge of the photo look familiar?)

It's a small world

I downloaded this image from the Travels with Samantha travelogue (an early version of a travel blog) in 1993. I used this very calming image for my screen background in the high-stress period while performing my PhD research and writing it up. Back then, I had no clue who this Philip Greenspun character was, except that he if very open about his attraction to pretty women and takes great photos. See the bears fishing at Katmai series if you need more proof.

I am not sure what prompted me to look at the photos again last week, but I did. I couldn't believe it! Could there be two Mike O'Briens from Venice Beach absolutely gonzo about geysers? I think not. That's "big Mike" from my current research group.

I showed the comment to my office-mate this summer (same MIT student intern as last year), and he said, "Philip Greenspun is a real character."

"You know him?"

"Yes, he teaches occasionally at MIT and I took a couple of classes with him."

Asides:
I blew another week of my life that I will never get back trying to move data (unsuccessfully) between two "hardened sites". I am beside myself with fury. Think about the overhead in our lives from deterring theft and hackers, not to mention airport security. Is it really worth it?

Serenity now. I finished blocking and ironing (yes!) the ribbon lace scarf. I will try to post a picture of the scarf on Iris tomorrow in natural light.

She is spending the first 6 weeks of the summer at Performing Arts Workshop. I need to make her a long dark dress with two aprons (one frilly white, one bright and simple) by July 11. That gives me two weekends. But Mark wants to go to San Diego during the holiday weekend. Make that one weekend. But Iris neglected to tell me until I asked her at dinner tonight. Make that one day to make the costumes. Serenity now. Recall that I am the mother that made 22 costumes for her kindergarten class concert in one weekend. I can handle this.

Hats attack New York

Last weekend, Iris learned that her mom used to work as a wardrobe mistress/chief dresser at an equity theater. What is a wardrobe mistress, she asked? Through the serendipitous nature of the internet and search engines, I learned that Martha Stewart has a wardrobe mistress and a blog!

I loved the hats in the Come see hats, hats, and more great hats!! entry so much, I had to show you one. Follow the link to see a couple of dozen more fantastic hats.

The blog is also delicious tongue in cheek fun. Learn another use for black Sharpies.

Karena, my wardrobe mistress, painting the soles of my Louboutins black - I am not a fan of the signature red soles and always change the red to black - this is easy if you use a broad sharpie.

Has any one else ever been sent to prison for carrying a Hermes Birkin bag? Did she have a wardrobe mistress during the trial? I know it is outside the scope of the wardrobe mistress' job, but someone should have stopped her before the mink scarf and Birkin bag incidents. Don't defense lawyers send their clients to wardrobe consultants?

I am a hat person. Mark and I bought height extenders for our Billy bookcases so I could better show off my collection. Perhaps I will dust off a few of my favorites and photograph them for you.

Links:

• Come see hats, hats, and more great hats!!
• A Place to Hang Her Hats at home with Mimi Weddell, subject of of the documentary “Hats Off”.
• A Head for Hats Patt Morrison shows how to wear a hat. (Mark did jury duty with her but never got up the nerve to talk to her. He said I would have liked her hats.)
• Hatfetish.com aka Berkeley Hat Company. A good source of finished hats and millinery supplies, back in my wardrobe mistress days.
  

Homework détente 3

A follow up to the thread, Homework plagiarism, Homework détente, Homework détente 2 and Open House.

Iris finished the satellite model and the first draft of the report last weekend with us riding herd, but not doing the project for her. At first, she wanted to make a satellite that would save our planet from global warming, a giant umbrella of some sort.

I could have just let her turn in her umbrella and world globe and let her be done with it, but I talked her out of it. As commentator Eric C. mentioned, it would have been better to ask Socratic questions. But she doesn't have any clue about the complexity and energy expenditure to put a giant umbrella in space. I told her that it had been suggested before and rejected as impractical.

Fortunately, she had seen Spy Kids 1-3 the weekend before that. (Don't ask why we let her watch so much TV that weekend.) The satellite section of the library was cleaned out, but the spy section contained 2 books (1 a gem) about spy satellites. She was hooked.

She started with a shoe box, but abandoned that for an IKEA desk organizer box with a lid. She found a little plastic snack box and some cardboard in the craft room and constructed a "camera". She covered it in foil while I covered the bigger box with foil. The foil represents solar photovotaic cells. I showed her how to create a hinge with clear package tape. She made the rest of the hinges.

With the globe, I showed her how the satellite has to store energy to operate in earth's shadow. She remembered the batteries in the clock she took apart last month and quickly ran downstairs for 2 AA batteries from our e-waste box. She taped them inside her spacecraft, with the battery ends touching a foil-covered part of the camera. (She was very proud that she observed and remembered that batteries need a metal contact.) She had both positive ends touching the camera and I showed her how batteries are usually alternated +/-. She made the change.

Mark printed out a 60's style space logo which she cut out and glued to the side. She told me that she could make a model of the plane that catches the film canisters that drop out the trap door of her satellite, but that would be showing off. No, she would not show off. She is done with her project.

Not so fast, she needs to rewrite the final draft in cursive.

Anyway, I periodically browse Trends in Japan; I like to look at the rampant creativity in the Street Style slide shows. Serendipitously, the top link on the main page goes to The Science of Origami. What should I see but a folded satellite antenna?

(Photo courtesy of Dr. Nojima Taketoshi)You pull opposite sides of the piece and the antenna blooms before your eyes, all while maintaining a steady center of gravity! Magical.

An artist's conception of the antenna in space.

The Black Swan

I just finished reading The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Amazingly, I had never heard of him or the book before serendipitously finding it in the new books section at the library.

The title refers to the commonly held European fallacy that, because a black swan hadn't been observed, then no black swans must exist. Black swans became synonymous with things that don't exist. So many people fall for this "round trip" reasoning error. Black swans do exist in Australia, a place Europeans had not visited yet when they coined the phrase.

Like The Corrections, I almost stopped reading the book after a couple of dozen pages. But I am glad I continued reading, because both books got better and better. In fact, you might do better to skip the TBS's prologue and short autobiography (the despised narrative!) and dive into the evisceration of the ubiquitous Gaussian bell curve in part 3 and then go back to read from the beginning.

Here is a delicious passage from the end of chapter 8:

My biggest problem with the educational system lies precisely in that it forces students to squeeze explanations out of subject matters and shames them for withholding judgment, for uttering the "I don't know."

Or from the beginning of chapter 18 about the phoniness of invoking quantum mechanics and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle for systems that have nothing to do with quantum scales and observables. (Quantum mechanics has great predictive value precisely because the quantum scale world follows such nice and neat statistical distributions.)

But political, social, and weather events do not have this handy property, and we patently cannot predict them, so when you hear "experts" presenting the problems of uncertainty in terms of subatomic particles, odds are the expert is a phony. As a matter of fact, this may be the best way to spot a phony.

Taleb is an excellent spotter of bullshit and you should read The Black Swan.

Finally, I want to close with a passage from Daniel Stern's "Crib Monologues from a Psychoanalytic Perspective", chapter 9 of Narratives from the Crib.

The pleasure principle in psychoanalysis can be interpreted very narrowly in terms of excitation which disturbs a resting equilibrium by adding a quantum of energy which is experienced as unpleasure and pushes the psychic system to discharge energy equal to that introduced into the system. The discharge of energy and the return of the system to equilibrium will be experienced as pleasure. Or, the pleasure principle can be interpreted more broadly and without the energy metaphor in terms of psychic systems at equilibrium, in states of perturbation and disequilibrium, and in terms of the motives and moves to reequilibrate the system at an old or new point of equilibrium. And this, of course, brings us to the narrative, its elements and its engine.