I'm a strange combination of extremely busy and lazy right now, so I'm relying on UCF memes for posts. Normally I let memes slide by, but after reading Eric's book post, I decided that doing the book meme from my office might elicit something strange, if not humorous.
Here's the meme:
1. Take five books off your bookshelf.
2. Book #1 -- first sentence
3. Book #2 -- last sentence on page fifty
4. Book #3 -- second sentence on page one hundred
5. Book #4 -- next to the last sentence on page one hundred fifty
6. Book #5 -- final sentence of the book
7. Make the five sentences into a paragraph....
OK, but I have to warn you that the only non-science books I have in my office are for studying foreign languages:
Однажды весною, в час небывало жаркого заката, в Москве, на Патриарших прудах, появились два гражданина. Что, однако, резко отличает его от товарищей по работе -- это то, что на всех этапах его пути его сопровождают слухи об интригах, о нарушении дисциплины, о самоуправстве, о клевете на товарищей, даже о доносах полиции на соперников. それはどな用事でしたか。所長から聞いた。先制は何も言わずに教室を出て行かれた。
One unseasonably hot spring day, at the hour of sunset, two citizens appeared in the Park of the Patriarch's Ponds in Moscow. What, however, sharply distinguishes him from his comrades in arms - is that every step of his way is accompanied by rumors about intrigues, breach of discipline, arbitrariness, slander of his comrades, even about betrayal of his rivals to the police. On what matter was he summoned? The head of the institute had written. The teacher left the classroom without saying a word.
1. Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
2. Portraits of the Revolutionaries by Lev Trotsky
3. Office Japanese by Hajime Takamizawa
4. Japanese, the Written Language Prt 2 by Eleanor Harz Jordan and Mari Noda (spit - I hate hate hate Jordan's teaching methods)
5. Japanese verbs at a Glance by Naoko Chino
OK, I learned a couple of things. First, this kind of exercise is far easier with Japanese where the topic of conversation is set once a paragraph or so, and sentences thereafter are usually subjectless, and can be fit into all kinds of patterns when taken out of context. Second, I also learned that if you take random sentences out of my library, even if the flow is a bit broken, it sounds really, really sinister. Well, what can you expect, I study Russian, Japanese, and Chinese. That is vaguely sinister, when you think about it.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Monday, February 9, 2009
A Question for All You Scientists and Engineers Out There
When was the last time you went to the library? What did you check out? Did you copy anything?
Our institution no longer has a print library for journals, and the only reason I see to keep them in some institutions is to access older stuff that has not yet been digitized. I have not made a copy of an article on a copy machine in probably 7 years, now.
If you had told me in grad school that the copy machine would be a thing of the past within 5 years of graduation, I would have looked at you as if you had just landed from the Planet Idiot.
These musings were prompted by this article.
I attend several large conferences each year, and get a subscription to several print journals as part of my society fees. I don't read them. I search the TOC of the on-line editions each month, instead. The only print issue I keep is the big, fat one with all the abstracts from that international conference, because it's still easier for me to look at a print version to see the other, related, presentations from that journal, which I might miss searching the conference CD using keywords.
I think moving to pure on-line publishing for most articles, with perhaps once-per-quarter print editions of the most important stuff is probably they direction that scientific publishing should be headed.
That being said, there will have to be sources found to replace print ad revenue, and pop-up ads in on-line versions are not going to be popular.
Our institution no longer has a print library for journals, and the only reason I see to keep them in some institutions is to access older stuff that has not yet been digitized. I have not made a copy of an article on a copy machine in probably 7 years, now.
If you had told me in grad school that the copy machine would be a thing of the past within 5 years of graduation, I would have looked at you as if you had just landed from the Planet Idiot.
These musings were prompted by this article.
I attend several large conferences each year, and get a subscription to several print journals as part of my society fees. I don't read them. I search the TOC of the on-line editions each month, instead. The only print issue I keep is the big, fat one with all the abstracts from that international conference, because it's still easier for me to look at a print version to see the other, related, presentations from that journal, which I might miss searching the conference CD using keywords.
I think moving to pure on-line publishing for most articles, with perhaps once-per-quarter print editions of the most important stuff is probably they direction that scientific publishing should be headed.
That being said, there will have to be sources found to replace print ad revenue, and pop-up ads in on-line versions are not going to be popular.
Friday, February 6, 2009
I Swear
...that I did not see the title of this blog post by Philip Davis before I wrote my piece on Rossler. I guess great minds think alike.
If you didn't click the link, the post describes a publishing scandal very similar to the editorial shenanigans that I described in detail in my post about Otto Rossler, involving the very same journal, but this time surrounding the Editor-in-Chief, Mohamed El Naschie* rather than Rossler. It seems that El Naschie has published 322 papers in his own journal. When one considers that even a crank like Rossler has managed about 50 less in a 40 year career, one's mind begins to boggle.
As Phil notes in a follow-up post, El Naschie has been replaced as EIC, probably a case of too little, too late.
It does not surprise me that the Editor-in-Chief and founder of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals was involved in scientific controversy. It surprises me even less that this controversy is based on behavior similar to Rossler's: self-publishing articles that would be subjected to intense peer review in a journal with a high reputation. Acceptable behavior is dictated by behavior at the top, and Rossler was just following his boss's lead.
One thing that Davis said that is really, really good for the layman to keep in mind is this:
This is another way of looking at what I was saying in the previous post on Rossler. Of course people want to be good scientific citizens. Of course scientists want to publish in order to share their discoveries with others so that others don't repeat their work, but go on to advance science even farther by building on it. But that does not mean that the publishing scientist does not want to obtain the greatest amount of standing in return for their effort.
In my literary days I was a historicist. Historicists admit that there is a social aspect to every human endeavor. Unlike post-modernists, however, historicists never jumped the shark and claimed that the entire process to anything (especially science) is entirely social.
So, lets be clear that I'm agreeing with Davis as a historicist, not as a post-modernist. The social aspect of journal publishing outlined by Davis is a proxy for a process of physical reproduction of the experiments in a new publication. In the perfect world, all reviewers of a new manuscript would be required to reproduce the results in a new paper as part of the peer review process to provide a firewall against scientific fraud. In practice, there is not enough time in the day.
So top tier journals unleash the big dogs as peer reviewers, and those top scientists are likely to have performed experiments similar to the ones in a hypothetical new publication. The bottom of the barrel often performs no peer review beyond the editor and perhaps one other reviewer, usually also on the editorial board. In the case of CS&F, even this minimal review was skipped for the editor's publications.
When I dismantled Rossler's reputation in that previous post, I had not fully researched Chaos, Solitons and Fractals beyond finding that quote by Wen Zhen describing the unethical editorial practices that led to the inflation of the journal's Impact Factor. Since then, I've dug a little deeper into the matter, and I've seen a lot of quotes similar to this one:
One of the legitimate complaints about Impact Factor is that it does not take into account the size or the publishing norms of the field. Mathematics is a small field that publishes infrequently, so going by simple number of papers cited, journals in the field are going to get lower IFs than Biology journals which is larger and depends on rapid communication to grow the knowledge base**.
But once I turned my, well, not baleful eye, more an exasperated and pissed off hairy eyeball, to CS&F, well, as my friend MWT said, the whole thing stated to look like digging out a tumor with a spoon. The entire journal is tainted from thecrank-editor-in-chief down to Rossler.
Let's start at the beginning, shall we? Ah, screw that, I'm tired of this cluster of nuts. I, like Eric, want to write about something fun for a change. But when the LHC turns on again, the whole crew we've been writing about will get another burst of publicity, and I want to have everything laid out in black and white pixels so I can lump it all together in one big meta-post and mail it to the major media outlets to let them know that a group of bloggers who actually, you know, went to school and studied stuff, rather than studying how to write about stuff, actually did their work for them, thank you very much.
So here, in as concise a post as I can manage, is the evidence that anyone who has published in CS&F should take those papers right off of their CV and hide them, and anyone, such as Rossler, whose publication list is riddled with cites to that journal, should be laughed out of public discourse.
First of all, I became aware of the greater scandal with CS&F via the n-Category Cafe, a fine science blog that you all should read:
Please allow me one digression here - funding and other goodies are doled out by governments based on a mixture of quality and quantity of publications of the scientist in question. One of the main indicators of quality is the IF, so the game mentioned by Wen Zhen has serious implications on the distribution of public monies, when non-sensical, self-referential papers in CS&F are graded as A+ by a government funding agency. THIS is why cranks need to be driven out publicly and quickly - scarce research dollars should not be spent on them, but rather on legitimate research.
Those of you familiar with the Walter L. Wagner story will see a depressing repetition here. El Naschie was trained as an engineer, and claims a Ph.D. from Cambridge. Unfortunately, Cambridge no longer claims him:
Beyond his Ph.D., El Naschie claimed affiliation with Cambridge for a long time with no clear basis in reality:
But what, exactly, is he publishing? Well, as Derek Lowe noted, the physicists and mathematicians who have actually read his work have a pretty low opinion of it:
The Quantum Pontiff also notes the skepticism of reviewers interviewed by Nature about the scandal:
Hmmmm. The extent of harm is often hard to judge in a delayed feedback loop. The University of Frankfurt is reportedly initiating an investigation of El Naschie's claim to be affiliated with them, when his actual affiliation is:
It is interesting to note that Thompson really set itself up in this interview with El Naschie concerning the article On a fuzzy Kahler-like manifold which is consistent with the two slit experiment which was published in the other journal caught up in this scandal (CS&F and the International Journal of Nonlinear Science have been accused of requiring authors in either journal to cross-cite to drive up the IMpact Factor).
This attack on "traditional lines of demarcation" is quite a large red flag for crankhood - most real scientists are actively multidisciplinary, but also very, very cautious about going to far afield form their core training without being very careful that they are not making fundamental mistakes. And when the man boasts about high citation numbers? Well, just take a gander at this Google Scholar page, which gives the actual papers citing one of his more famous papers in Google Scholar at 38 cites. I sure didn't find any cites without El Naschie listed as an author. To give you a calibration, I have not published in the open scientific literature in about 10 years since becoming one of the evil minions of Industry and changing career paths, but my most-cited paper has been cited 345 times in 11 years, and only about 5 of those cites are from papers I authored.
Elsevier's practice of bundling journals so that librarires have no choice but to buy crud such as CS&F if the library wishes to purchase Elsevier's more prestigious journals has not made the publishing house any friends in Academia. The biology community is not happy with their decision to publish the journal Homeopathy, which lends a patina of legitimacy to that most unscientific of "disciplines".
I've been loath to jump on the bandwagon excoriating Elsevier, when I know that their journals do provide a publishing outlet when the channels at the Society-sponsored journals are full - there is just not enough space in the more "altruistic" formats to publish everything that comes out of Academia, and private publishers do perform a useful function in filling the gap. No one complains about Nature Publishing Group turning a profit, because they maintain their quality standards. The issue is not one of private versus "altruistic", and Academics would do well to remember this before going off into tirades that betray their ignorance of economics. The issue is that Elsevier is behaving as a near-monopoly in a way that leads to one of two possible conclusions - either they are asleep at the wheel, or they are publishing and bundling known crap, and degrading the prestige of their other journals in the procerss purely out of greed.
One of those two conculsions is correct, but I do not have the time or resources to ascertain which one. And in fact, both lead to the same unhappy end for Elsevier, unless they clean up their act. The only conclusion I can come to for certain is that anyone who regularly published in CS&F is tainted. I know that I would be taking any publications in CS&F off of my CV, if I had any.
Which I don't. :p
* For the scientifically uninitiated, that "lecture" is chock full of vague buzzwords, banal observations, and scientific non-sequiturs. What exactly this branch of mathematics has to do with nanotechnology, I have no idea, and I speak as someone trained in several branches of nanotechnology.
** Biology, let's be very frank here, is the easiest of the hard sciences, or at least the one that requires the least math. People who balk at chemistry or physics at junior and senior levels of college because of the sharp increase in applied math at that level tend to drop into biology as a consolation prize. In science there is a very definite hierarchy of perceived difficulty based on math content (and hey, I'm a P-chemist, so I say that there is a high correlation between perception and reality here :p). Taking my tongue partially out of my cheek, biology is also the science that's going to give you the greatest bang for your buck in terms of innovation at this point in history, so it is not exactly a bad thing that biology is heavily populated right now. But take a poll of 100 doctors and ask how many started as Chemistry majors and switched to biology when P-Chem loomed large. The driver for migration into biology is not perceived utility, but perceived ease of obtaining a degree with decent grades. Even when biology begins to become less fruitful 50 years hence, it's still going to attract more students than high math disciplines.
If you didn't click the link, the post describes a publishing scandal very similar to the editorial shenanigans that I described in detail in my post about Otto Rossler, involving the very same journal, but this time surrounding the Editor-in-Chief, Mohamed El Naschie* rather than Rossler. It seems that El Naschie has published 322 papers in his own journal. When one considers that even a crank like Rossler has managed about 50 less in a 40 year career, one's mind begins to boggle.
As Phil notes in a follow-up post, El Naschie has been replaced as EIC, probably a case of too little, too late.
It does not surprise me that the Editor-in-Chief and founder of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals was involved in scientific controversy. It surprises me even less that this controversy is based on behavior similar to Rossler's: self-publishing articles that would be subjected to intense peer review in a journal with a high reputation. Acceptable behavior is dictated by behavior at the top, and Rossler was just following his boss's lead.
One thing that Davis said that is really, really good for the layman to keep in mind is this:
A journal is a community of individuals, and membership in each community is conferred with the successful transfer of a manuscript. If this gift is accepted, the author receives a symbolic transfer of prestige back from that community. Prestige is legitimated when it is recognized by the broader scientific community. If I have never heard of your journal, then being an author means nothing to me. If your article is published in a controversial journal, then that association is transferred as well.
This is another way of looking at what I was saying in the previous post on Rossler. Of course people want to be good scientific citizens. Of course scientists want to publish in order to share their discoveries with others so that others don't repeat their work, but go on to advance science even farther by building on it. But that does not mean that the publishing scientist does not want to obtain the greatest amount of standing in return for their effort.
In my literary days I was a historicist. Historicists admit that there is a social aspect to every human endeavor. Unlike post-modernists, however, historicists never jumped the shark and claimed that the entire process to anything (especially science) is entirely social.
So, lets be clear that I'm agreeing with Davis as a historicist, not as a post-modernist. The social aspect of journal publishing outlined by Davis is a proxy for a process of physical reproduction of the experiments in a new publication. In the perfect world, all reviewers of a new manuscript would be required to reproduce the results in a new paper as part of the peer review process to provide a firewall against scientific fraud. In practice, there is not enough time in the day.
So top tier journals unleash the big dogs as peer reviewers, and those top scientists are likely to have performed experiments similar to the ones in a hypothetical new publication. The bottom of the barrel often performs no peer review beyond the editor and perhaps one other reviewer, usually also on the editorial board. In the case of CS&F, even this minimal review was skipped for the editor's publications.
When I dismantled Rossler's reputation in that previous post, I had not fully researched Chaos, Solitons and Fractals beyond finding that quote by Wen Zhen describing the unethical editorial practices that led to the inflation of the journal's Impact Factor. Since then, I've dug a little deeper into the matter, and I've seen a lot of quotes similar to this one:
For you see, the most simple minded, stupid, and yet pervasive index of journal quality is the Impact Factor, peddled by none other than (you guessed it) Thomson Scientific, which determines the quality of the journal by the brilliant and subtle method of dividing the number of citations are received from publications indexed by Thomson by the number of articles in the journal (in other words, the sort of thing a monkey would come up with). As a result mostly of citations to itself, CFS has a higher impact factor than any mathematics journal, even though it is worthless pseudoscience. (Journals in other fields consistently have higher IFs than mathematics, since they write more, shorter, papers, and thus tend to cite each other more often).
One of the legitimate complaints about Impact Factor is that it does not take into account the size or the publishing norms of the field. Mathematics is a small field that publishes infrequently, so going by simple number of papers cited, journals in the field are going to get lower IFs than Biology journals which is larger and depends on rapid communication to grow the knowledge base**.
But once I turned my, well, not baleful eye, more an exasperated and pissed off hairy eyeball, to CS&F, well, as my friend MWT said, the whole thing stated to look like digging out a tumor with a spoon. The entire journal is tainted from the
Let's start at the beginning, shall we? Ah, screw that, I'm tired of this cluster of nuts. I, like Eric, want to write about something fun for a change. But when the LHC turns on again, the whole crew we've been writing about will get another burst of publicity, and I want to have everything laid out in black and white pixels so I can lump it all together in one big meta-post and mail it to the major media outlets to let them know that a group of bloggers who actually, you know, went to school and studied stuff, rather than studying how to write about stuff, actually did their work for them, thank you very much.
So here, in as concise a post as I can manage, is the evidence that anyone who has published in CS&F should take those papers right off of their CV and hide them, and anyone, such as Rossler, whose publication list is riddled with cites to that journal, should be laughed out of public discourse.
First of all, I became aware of the greater scandal with CS&F via the n-Category Cafe, a fine science blog that you all should read:
It is sad that some academic institutions and, in larger extent, some publishers back those people up. For example, Elsevier has a journal called Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, included unfortunately in the A+ category in quality by the Australian Academy of Sciences, in a powerful commercial citation factory called Current Contents and with high “impact factor” over 3. It is not that in Chaos etc. there are no good papers, some are normal regular hard science. But, a significant and very visible percentage of papers there belong to one and the same group of people including the very editor, certain El Naschie, a person with many bogus affiliations, and writing in recent years papers with practically no arguments but high predictions based on numerology, coincidences and fancy pictures combining Lie algebras, chaos theory and so on, at the layman level.
Please allow me one digression here - funding and other goodies are doled out by governments based on a mixture of quality and quantity of publications of the scientist in question. One of the main indicators of quality is the IF, so the game mentioned by Wen Zhen has serious implications on the distribution of public monies, when non-sensical, self-referential papers in CS&F are graded as A+ by a government funding agency. THIS is why cranks need to be driven out publicly and quickly - scarce research dollars should not be spent on them, but rather on legitimate research.
Those of you familiar with the Walter L. Wagner story will see a depressing repetition here. El Naschie was trained as an engineer, and claims a Ph.D. from Cambridge. Unfortunately, Cambridge no longer claims him:
One further aspect is whether El Naschie's PhD thesis, claimed to have been accepted at University College London in the 1970s, exists or not. No clear information on this has yet emerged.
Beyond his Ph.D., El Naschie claimed affiliation with Cambridge for a long time with no clear basis in reality:
El naschie keeps publishing junks in CSF for a quite long time and kept unnoticed by mentoring system of Elsevier which seems very odd. While it was so obvious from the far beginning that we have a crackpot.
The same applies to Cambridge university which allowed him to publish his articles for nearly ten years 1993-2001 using its affiliation, while, for sure, he wasn't a staff member there. It is far from reality to imagine that people in Cambridge have been fooled for that long time.
But what, exactly, is he publishing? Well, as Derek Lowe noted, the physicists and mathematicians who have actually read his work have a pretty low opinion of it:
While I'm not qualified to referee his works, those who are report that his papers don't make much sense - "undisciplined numerology larded with impressive buzzwords" is one review at the UT site. (That's a phrase I'm going to have to remember for future use; it's bound to come in handy).
The Quantum Pontiff also notes the skepticism of reviewers interviewed by Nature about the scandal:
Scene three: tensions rise. Peer reviewed or not peer reviewed, that is the question:
Most scientists contacted by Nature comment that El Naschie's papers tend to be of poor quality. Peter Woit, a mathematical physicist at Columbia University in New York, says he thinks that "it's plain obvious that there was either zero, or at best very poor, peer review, of his own papers". There is, however, little evidence that they have harmed the field as a whole.
Hmmmm. The extent of harm is often hard to judge in a delayed feedback loop. The University of Frankfurt is reportedly initiating an investigation of El Naschie's claim to be affiliated with them, when his actual affiliation is:
a private association, called the “Frankfurter Förderverein für physikalische Grundlagenforschung” (Frankfurt association for the support of basic research in phyiscs).
It is interesting to note that Thompson really set itself up in this interview with El Naschie concerning the article On a fuzzy Kahler-like manifold which is consistent with the two slit experiment which was published in the other journal caught up in this scandal (CS&F and the International Journal of Nonlinear Science have been accused of requiring authors in either journal to cross-cite to drive up the IMpact Factor).
In fact, I have never recognized the traditional lines of demarcation between the sciences, not even between theoretical physics and engineering, let alone pure mathematics and applied physics. Thus, the melting of math, physics, and experimental realism may have appealed to similarly-inclined researchers and thus led to the high citation rate of this particular paper.
However, in any event, one should not forget that my approach in this paper, namely geometrizing physics, is in a direction where the majority of theoretical physicists working on the Minkowski-Einstein program are involved, and that the two-slit experiment which I attempt to resolve in the same paper is arguably the most famous and most difficult problem in quantum mechanics. There are also possible applications, as yet undreamed, for this experiment in nano and quantum technology. This may also have contributed to the high citation rate.
This attack on "traditional lines of demarcation" is quite a large red flag for crankhood - most real scientists are actively multidisciplinary, but also very, very cautious about going to far afield form their core training without being very careful that they are not making fundamental mistakes. And when the man boasts about high citation numbers? Well, just take a gander at this Google Scholar page, which gives the actual papers citing one of his more famous papers in Google Scholar at 38 cites. I sure didn't find any cites without El Naschie listed as an author. To give you a calibration, I have not published in the open scientific literature in about 10 years since becoming one of the evil minions of Industry and changing career paths, but my most-cited paper has been cited 345 times in 11 years, and only about 5 of those cites are from papers I authored.
Elsevier's practice of bundling journals so that librarires have no choice but to buy crud such as CS&F if the library wishes to purchase Elsevier's more prestigious journals has not made the publishing house any friends in Academia. The biology community is not happy with their decision to publish the journal Homeopathy, which lends a patina of legitimacy to that most unscientific of "disciplines".
I've been loath to jump on the bandwagon excoriating Elsevier, when I know that their journals do provide a publishing outlet when the channels at the Society-sponsored journals are full - there is just not enough space in the more "altruistic" formats to publish everything that comes out of Academia, and private publishers do perform a useful function in filling the gap. No one complains about Nature Publishing Group turning a profit, because they maintain their quality standards. The issue is not one of private versus "altruistic", and Academics would do well to remember this before going off into tirades that betray their ignorance of economics. The issue is that Elsevier is behaving as a near-monopoly in a way that leads to one of two possible conclusions - either they are asleep at the wheel, or they are publishing and bundling known crap, and degrading the prestige of their other journals in the procerss purely out of greed.
One of those two conculsions is correct, but I do not have the time or resources to ascertain which one. And in fact, both lead to the same unhappy end for Elsevier, unless they clean up their act. The only conclusion I can come to for certain is that anyone who regularly published in CS&F is tainted. I know that I would be taking any publications in CS&F off of my CV, if I had any.
Which I don't. :p
* For the scientifically uninitiated, that "lecture" is chock full of vague buzzwords, banal observations, and scientific non-sequiturs. What exactly this branch of mathematics has to do with nanotechnology, I have no idea, and I speak as someone trained in several branches of nanotechnology.
** Biology, let's be very frank here, is the easiest of the hard sciences, or at least the one that requires the least math. People who balk at chemistry or physics at junior and senior levels of college because of the sharp increase in applied math at that level tend to drop into biology as a consolation prize. In science there is a very definite hierarchy of perceived difficulty based on math content (and hey, I'm a P-chemist, so I say that there is a high correlation between perception and reality here :p). Taking my tongue partially out of my cheek, biology is also the science that's going to give you the greatest bang for your buck in terms of innovation at this point in history, so it is not exactly a bad thing that biology is heavily populated right now. But take a poll of 100 doctors and ask how many started as Chemistry majors and switched to biology when P-Chem loomed large. The driver for migration into biology is not perceived utility, but perceived ease of obtaining a degree with decent grades. Even when biology begins to become less fruitful 50 years hence, it's still going to attract more students than high math disciplines.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
25
I rarely participate in memes, but this one's been going around the UCF: 25 random facts about yourself. I've kind of liked the answers and I'm at at least as random as Michelle, and probably twice as crazy as anyone in the UCF, excepting Jim, so here goes:
My surname is Prussian.
I have both Scotts (Clan Munro) and Irish (Brady) in my background, as befits a true Southerner, but that mix in combination with Prussian is truly unholy.
One of my distant ancestors was a Brit in New Amsterdam, and was jailed briefly by the Dutch for shooting his neighbor’s dog when the dog dug up his garden.
I have ancestors who served on both sides of both the Revolution and the Civil War.
When I was 5 I wanted to be a “stinky ol’ farmer”, as my grandfather the farmer put it.
I had my first taste of chewing tobacco when I was 5. Same grandfather. He “forgot” to tell me to spit. I swallowed. I have not had a chew since. o.O
I had my first taste of beer around the same time. It was Pabst Blue Ribbon. I didn’t drink beer again until I was 25. My grandfather may have been a farmer, but when it came to keeping kids away from temptations, he wasn’t stupid. :D
I was a very poor student my first two years in high school, because I had idiots whom I did not respect for teachers, but I got my act together the second two years enough to finish in the top 7. My SAT score beat the valedictorian's by over 150 points, and I was the only National Merit Scholar in the county the year I graduated.
I have a letter of commendation from Komsomol. It was for serving in the Stroiotryady. On the stroiotryad I laid bricks and roofed an apartment building in Moscow.
I have been detained by the KGB twice*. It was in Gorbachev’s USSR, so I was not too scared. (Yeah, right.)
I was in the middle of this.
I have never been south of the equator.
When I was a child, I frequently flew in helicopters piloted by both US Army and ARVN veterans.
My father was a meteorologist.
My father’s poor health strongly colors my memories of my childhood. He had a rare heart condition known as Tetralogy of Fallot. Complications from it killed him when I was 20.
I still miss him. He was the strongest person I ever knew. Even late in his life when he’d turn blue from lack of oxygen after a dozen steps, he never stooped to getting a handicapped parking permit. That was for really handicapped people.
I was a bang-up student in college, and finished my 4-year degree with a 4-year certificate in the translation of technical Russian in 3 years. I missed having my father see me graduate by 6 months.
I have pretty long ear hair for my age. If I forget to trim it, certain people in my life are likely to ask me “what are you, a dog?”.
I still bite my nails. This led to some pretty nasty tastes in Organic Chemistry.
I don’t think I work hard enough.
My biggest regret in life is not having served in uniform.
The place where I’ve lived that I miss the most is Tokyo.
The place I’d most like to live next is Singapore.
When I retire, I want to buy a farm in Loudoun County, VA.
When I die, I will be buried in Virginia, in a cemetery full of Confederate Soldiers named “Union Cemetery”. I think that’s fitting.
*Ol’ Tank’s going to have a field day with that one :D
My surname is Prussian.
I have both Scotts (Clan Munro) and Irish (Brady) in my background, as befits a true Southerner, but that mix in combination with Prussian is truly unholy.
One of my distant ancestors was a Brit in New Amsterdam, and was jailed briefly by the Dutch for shooting his neighbor’s dog when the dog dug up his garden.
I have ancestors who served on both sides of both the Revolution and the Civil War.
When I was 5 I wanted to be a “stinky ol’ farmer”, as my grandfather the farmer put it.
I had my first taste of chewing tobacco when I was 5. Same grandfather. He “forgot” to tell me to spit. I swallowed. I have not had a chew since. o.O
I had my first taste of beer around the same time. It was Pabst Blue Ribbon. I didn’t drink beer again until I was 25. My grandfather may have been a farmer, but when it came to keeping kids away from temptations, he wasn’t stupid. :D
I was a very poor student my first two years in high school, because I had idiots whom I did not respect for teachers, but I got my act together the second two years enough to finish in the top 7. My SAT score beat the valedictorian's by over 150 points, and I was the only National Merit Scholar in the county the year I graduated.
I have a letter of commendation from Komsomol. It was for serving in the Stroiotryady. On the stroiotryad I laid bricks and roofed an apartment building in Moscow.
I have been detained by the KGB twice*. It was in Gorbachev’s USSR, so I was not too scared. (Yeah, right.)
I was in the middle of this.
I have never been south of the equator.
When I was a child, I frequently flew in helicopters piloted by both US Army and ARVN veterans.
My father was a meteorologist.
My father’s poor health strongly colors my memories of my childhood. He had a rare heart condition known as Tetralogy of Fallot. Complications from it killed him when I was 20.
I still miss him. He was the strongest person I ever knew. Even late in his life when he’d turn blue from lack of oxygen after a dozen steps, he never stooped to getting a handicapped parking permit. That was for really handicapped people.
I was a bang-up student in college, and finished my 4-year degree with a 4-year certificate in the translation of technical Russian in 3 years. I missed having my father see me graduate by 6 months.
I have pretty long ear hair for my age. If I forget to trim it, certain people in my life are likely to ask me “what are you, a dog?”.
I still bite my nails. This led to some pretty nasty tastes in Organic Chemistry.
I don’t think I work hard enough.
My biggest regret in life is not having served in uniform.
The place where I’ve lived that I miss the most is Tokyo.
The place I’d most like to live next is Singapore.
When I retire, I want to buy a farm in Loudoun County, VA.
When I die, I will be buried in Virginia, in a cemetery full of Confederate Soldiers named “Union Cemetery”. I think that’s fitting.
*Ol’ Tank’s going to have a field day with that one :D
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Happy 4707!
Or 4706 if you are a heathen Communist. :D
One of my co-contributors at Chicagoboyz has a blog titled "Between Worlds". I also live that way, but by choice - we speak primarily Mandarin at home, I travel to Japan frequently, older Russians and I share not-so-fond memories of how it used to be in the USSR, and I'm a Johnny Reb living in Yankeeland.
My wife, of course, is even more between worlds than I, having grown up in a Taiwan still under Martial Law where speaking her mother's native tongue of Taiwanese would get her a monetary fine, and moving to the US at a young age, adding English to her polyglot mix.
I really don't find my personal path all that unusual, as I work with a lot of people who were not born in the US, but once in a while it hits me that I'm a lot different from most of my older relatives who never traveled more than 50 miles from home. Chinese New Year is one such time.
I was in Singapore not long ago, sitting in the food court of a shopping mall. A distinctive (to most Chinese people) voice came on the PA Muzak system, singing a song called Tian Mi Mi (甜蜜蜜):
There I was, only a few degrees above the equator on the other side of the world, and I recognized not only the tune, but the words and the singer, Teresa Teng (鄧麗君). Suddenly, I felt a little alien to myself.
在哪里在哪里見過你
Zai na li, zai na li jian guo ni
Where, where have I seen you before
你的笑容這樣熟悉
Ni de xiao rong zhe yang shou xi
Your laughter is so familiar
我一時想不起
Wo yi shi xiang bu qi
I can't remember at the moment
啊~~在夢里
A... zai meng li
Ah... in my dreams
夢里夢里見過你
Meng li, meng li jian guo ni
In my dreams, in my dreams I've seen you before
甜蜜笑得多甜蜜
Tian mi, xiao de duo tian mi
Sweetly, smiles so sweetly
是你~是你~夢見的就是你
Shi ni! shi ni! meng jian de jiu shi ni
It's you! It's you! The one in my dreams is you!
So to all of you Refugees out there, missing a little of China this New Year:
新年快樂!
One of my co-contributors at Chicagoboyz has a blog titled "Between Worlds". I also live that way, but by choice - we speak primarily Mandarin at home, I travel to Japan frequently, older Russians and I share not-so-fond memories of how it used to be in the USSR, and I'm a Johnny Reb living in Yankeeland.
My wife, of course, is even more between worlds than I, having grown up in a Taiwan still under Martial Law where speaking her mother's native tongue of Taiwanese would get her a monetary fine, and moving to the US at a young age, adding English to her polyglot mix.
I really don't find my personal path all that unusual, as I work with a lot of people who were not born in the US, but once in a while it hits me that I'm a lot different from most of my older relatives who never traveled more than 50 miles from home. Chinese New Year is one such time.
I was in Singapore not long ago, sitting in the food court of a shopping mall. A distinctive (to most Chinese people) voice came on the PA Muzak system, singing a song called Tian Mi Mi (甜蜜蜜):
There I was, only a few degrees above the equator on the other side of the world, and I recognized not only the tune, but the words and the singer, Teresa Teng (鄧麗君). Suddenly, I felt a little alien to myself.
在哪里在哪里見過你
Zai na li, zai na li jian guo ni
Where, where have I seen you before
你的笑容這樣熟悉
Ni de xiao rong zhe yang shou xi
Your laughter is so familiar
我一時想不起
Wo yi shi xiang bu qi
I can't remember at the moment
啊~~在夢里
A... zai meng li
Ah... in my dreams
夢里夢里見過你
Meng li, meng li jian guo ni
In my dreams, in my dreams I've seen you before
甜蜜笑得多甜蜜
Tian mi, xiao de duo tian mi
Sweetly, smiles so sweetly
是你~是你~夢見的就是你
Shi ni! shi ni! meng jian de jiu shi ni
It's you! It's you! The one in my dreams is you!
So to all of you Refugees out there, missing a little of China this New Year:
新年快樂!
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Thanks, CW
We usually don't get a lot of strange hits on this blog, it's not high-traffic enough. Usually the non-regular hits are for CW's aviation stuff or the mixed nuts of the Wagnerite faction who repeatedly refresh the pages and drive up our hit counts, as if refreshing the page will suddenly make a post agreeing with them appear on this site, just like the pink dragons that the LHC will create once the magnet is fixed.
We've had lot of hits lately for CW's space post, too. But I don't get the naked Sarah Palin searches that weird Jim out so much.
However, and this is all CW's fault, we've been getting these lately:
does obama believe the greys are here since roswell and before
Answer - No. As much as I disagree with and dislike the man (and that's probably not as much as some of you think and more than others think), he's not stupid and he's not insane. Get some help or start taking your meds more regularly, dude.
And that goes for you, too:
obama alien agenda
The only alien agenda Obama has will have to do with Mexicans.
Update: Great Googly Moogly, it just doesn't stop:
obama will say truth about extraterrestrial
Yes. Yes he will. But only if you deposit $100,000 in my bank account. :D
And this? o.O
lin miao ke obama
Yanno, I've been known to call Obama a Socialist from time to time, but I really don't think he has an "in" with the CCP.
And this one either reveals a deep, deep and disturbing misunderstanding of fundamental biology (and a lot of pity on my part for this dude's pets), or it reveals a lack of Google-fu, because the keywords "genetic engineering" were left out:
deer and dogs interbreeding
One I just have no clue about, I think Michelle or Eric might have inspired it:
shirken island cows
although, as far as I can tell, the only reason we come up on that search is that the California statute CW cited in his Regulating Ninjas post mis-spelled SHURIKEN as shirken.
And Howard Dean needs to stop self-Googling:
hoooooo
because I don't think he meant to land on my post about Walter Wagner. So, what kind of weird hits do y'all get?
(Jim - keep yours to yourself. Even if you've actually got the naked Sarah Palin pics. We know what you weirdos get up to in those Alaskan sweat lodges, yes we do. :D)
We've had lot of hits lately for CW's space post, too. But I don't get the naked Sarah Palin searches that weird Jim out so much.
However, and this is all CW's fault, we've been getting these lately:
does obama believe the greys are here since roswell and before
Answer - No. As much as I disagree with and dislike the man (and that's probably not as much as some of you think and more than others think), he's not stupid and he's not insane. Get some help or start taking your meds more regularly, dude.
And that goes for you, too:
obama alien agenda
The only alien agenda Obama has will have to do with Mexicans.
Update: Great Googly Moogly, it just doesn't stop:
obama will say truth about extraterrestrial
Yes. Yes he will. But only if you deposit $100,000 in my bank account. :D
And this? o.O
lin miao ke obama
Yanno, I've been known to call Obama a Socialist from time to time, but I really don't think he has an "in" with the CCP.
And this one either reveals a deep, deep and disturbing misunderstanding of fundamental biology (and a lot of pity on my part for this dude's pets), or it reveals a lack of Google-fu, because the keywords "genetic engineering" were left out:
deer and dogs interbreeding
One I just have no clue about, I think Michelle or Eric might have inspired it:
shirken island cows
although, as far as I can tell, the only reason we come up on that search is that the California statute CW cited in his Regulating Ninjas post mis-spelled SHURIKEN as shirken.
And Howard Dean needs to stop self-Googling:
hoooooo
because I don't think he meant to land on my post about Walter Wagner. So, what kind of weird hits do y'all get?
(Jim - keep yours to yourself. Even if you've actually got the naked Sarah Palin pics. We know what you weirdos get up to in those Alaskan sweat lodges, yes we do. :D)
Friday, January 9, 2009
Long Chains of Water
Under the right conditions, water itself can polymerize, or form chains of molecules. This little known fact was first discovered in Soviet Defense Department-funded labs in the Polytechnic Institute of the ancient town of Kostroma, in the Golden Circle of Old Russia. There a Russian Chemist named Nikolai Fedyakin discovered that he could make small quantities of a hyperviscous water with an elevated boiling point and a depressed freezing point.
Fedyakin was obviously a low-level guy in the Soviet hierarchy, so the Russians soon put their top surface chemist, B.V. Derjaguin, on the problem.(1) Derjaguin continued to work on the problem with his assistant Churaev until the Russians were sure that there were no military applications to this spectacular new discovery.(2) Then they published those discoveries in the West. (3,4)
From there, Western scientists took up the task of characterizing this new form of what’s probably the most commonly used substance on earth. (5,6,7,8) Human beings had been looking at water for millenia, and looking at it scientifically for centuries, without discovering this amazing property of the substance. In a similar vein, a soccer-ball shaped molecule of carbon was discovered in soot thirty years later, another case of something wonderful being hidden in a substance so common, no one bothered to look at it critically anymore.
Western scientists attempted to explain this amazing form of water with a variety of theories (9,10), the most promising being a form of p-electron delocalization. (11) No one was ever able to completely figure out just what was going on at the molecular level, however, because no one was able to synthesize large quantities of the substance.
Derjaguin himself (12) took a crack at providing an explanation a few years after the excitement in the West had died down. But it was not until recently that there was any hope of explaining the forces that bind this unique and possibly useful form of water together. With the recent advances in both experiment (13) and supercomputing (14,15), we are beginning to explore the forces behind the clustering of water molecules, we are beginning to understand the ways that water molecules can cluster together.
1. Derjaguin, B. V., Churaev, N. V., Fedjakin, N. N., et al., Izv. Akad. Nauk. S.S.S.R., ser. khimich., N10, 2178 (1967).
2. Derjaguin, B. V., and Churaev, N. V., New Properties of Liquids (in Russian) (Nauka, Moscow, 1971).
3. Derjaguin, B. V., and Churaev, N. V., J. Coll. Interface Sci., 36, 415 (1971).
4. Derjaguin, B. V., and Churaev, N. V., Nature Phys. Sci., 232, 131 (1971).
5. C. T. O'Konski “Covalent Polymers of Water.” Science 168, 1089-1091 (1970)
6. C. A. Angell and E. J. Sare “Vitreous Water: Identification and Characterization.” Science 168, 280-281 (1970)
7. S. W. Rabideau and A. E. Florin “Anomalous Water: Characterization by Physical Methods.” Science 169, 48-52 (1970)
8. G. A. Castellion, D. G. Grabar, J. Hession, and H. Burkhard “Polywater: Methods for Identifying Polywater Columns and Evidence for Ordered Growth.” Science 167, 865-868 (1970)
9. L. C. Allen and P. A. Kollman “A Theory of Anomalous Water” Science 167, 1443-1454 (1970)
10. J. W. Linnett “Structure of Polywater” Science 167, 1719-1720 (1970)
11. R. P. Messmer “Polywater: Possibility of p-Electron Delocalization.” Science 168, 479-480 (1970)
12. Derjaguin, B. V., and Churaev, N. V., “Nature of "Anomalous Water” Nature 244, 430 - 431 (1973)
13. C.J. Gruenloh, J.R. Carney, C.A. Arrington, T.S. Zwier, S.Y. Fredericks, K.D. Jordan
“Infrared Spectrum of a Molecular Ice Cube: The S4 and D2d Water Octamers in Benzene-(Water)8” Science 276 1678 – 1681 (1997)
14. C.J. Tsai and K.D. Jordan, "Theoretical Study of the (H20)6 Cluster," Chemical Physics Letters 213, 181-88 (1993).
15. C.J. Tsai and K.D. Jordan, "Theoretical Study of Small Water Clusters: Low-Energy Fused Cubic Structures for (H2O)n, n=8, 12, 16 and 20," Journal of Physical Chemistry 97, 5208-10 (1993)
I hope you enjoyed this nicely documented piece I just put together.
Because it is complete and utter horse shit.
Fedyakin was real. He, as far as I know, was a two bit polytechnic teacher not associated with the Soviet Defense forces in any way expect the way that every Academic was in that highly militarized society. And, by the way, in the Soviet Union it was "Ministry of Defense", not "Defense Department".
Derjaguin and Churaev did run with the discovery, and then tout their results in the West. Western scientists did try to reproduce the results and study the structure of the substance for about four years. However, and I skipped this part, there were plenty of problems reproducing the results. I selectively did not cite these skeptical article from the heyday of polywater research:
W. M. Madigosky “Polywater or Sodium Acetate?” Science 172, 264-265 (1971)
D. L. Rousseau “ ‘Polywater’ and Sweat: Similarities between the Infrared Spectra” Science 171, 170-172 (1971)
S. L. Kurtin, C. A. Mead, W. A. Mueller, B. C. Kurtin, and E. D. Wolf “‘Polywater’: A Hydrosol?” Science 167, 1720-1722 (1970)
By the early seventies, Western scientists had concluded that polywater, which had only ever been made in trace amounts, was actually water with a whole lot of impurities in it, which explained the change in viscosity and colligative properties.
In addition, unless you actually went to look up the last Derjaguin reference, you would not be aware that it was actually the publication where he finally recanted and admitted that the Western scientists were correct about the composition of polywater.
And what about the more recent papers I cited? Well, water can polymerize to a slight degree via various methods of attraction between the molecules. Small polymers, less than a few hundred repeating units long, are often referred to as oligomers, and small amounts of these in a water sample will not cause the viscosity or colligative property changes claimed for polywater. The polywater part of the above essay has NOTHING to do with the water cluster work I cited. I just wanted to make that clear because one of the authors of the legitimate papers is a very old and dear friend of mine.
So the next time someone comes citing papers that actually come to the opposite conclusion of that of the citing “authority” (cough James Blodgett cough*), remember this: Always go back and READ THE ORIGINAL SOURCE when someone is citing papers in a scientific argument. Also, when you see papers that are more than a few years old being cited, go back and check to see if there are retractions, arguments, or alternative explanations proposed in the literature. Just because an argument cites scientific publications, it does not necessarily follow that the argument is scientifically valid.
*Specifically this reference, which predicts black holes - in certain very unlikely scenarios of string theory - and also predicts their rapid decay. You can't have one without the other, the theory predicts both events, but that title "Black Hole Factories" doesn't give you a clue as to that conclusion, you need to go look up the paper for yourself to find it. Bad physicist, bad.
Fedyakin was obviously a low-level guy in the Soviet hierarchy, so the Russians soon put their top surface chemist, B.V. Derjaguin, on the problem.(1) Derjaguin continued to work on the problem with his assistant Churaev until the Russians were sure that there were no military applications to this spectacular new discovery.(2) Then they published those discoveries in the West. (3,4)
From there, Western scientists took up the task of characterizing this new form of what’s probably the most commonly used substance on earth. (5,6,7,8) Human beings had been looking at water for millenia, and looking at it scientifically for centuries, without discovering this amazing property of the substance. In a similar vein, a soccer-ball shaped molecule of carbon was discovered in soot thirty years later, another case of something wonderful being hidden in a substance so common, no one bothered to look at it critically anymore.
Western scientists attempted to explain this amazing form of water with a variety of theories (9,10), the most promising being a form of p-electron delocalization. (11) No one was ever able to completely figure out just what was going on at the molecular level, however, because no one was able to synthesize large quantities of the substance.
Derjaguin himself (12) took a crack at providing an explanation a few years after the excitement in the West had died down. But it was not until recently that there was any hope of explaining the forces that bind this unique and possibly useful form of water together. With the recent advances in both experiment (13) and supercomputing (14,15), we are beginning to explore the forces behind the clustering of water molecules, we are beginning to understand the ways that water molecules can cluster together.
1. Derjaguin, B. V., Churaev, N. V., Fedjakin, N. N., et al., Izv. Akad. Nauk. S.S.S.R., ser. khimich., N10, 2178 (1967).
2. Derjaguin, B. V., and Churaev, N. V., New Properties of Liquids (in Russian) (Nauka, Moscow, 1971).
3. Derjaguin, B. V., and Churaev, N. V., J. Coll. Interface Sci., 36, 415 (1971).
4. Derjaguin, B. V., and Churaev, N. V., Nature Phys. Sci., 232, 131 (1971).
5. C. T. O'Konski “Covalent Polymers of Water.” Science 168, 1089-1091 (1970)
6. C. A. Angell and E. J. Sare “Vitreous Water: Identification and Characterization.” Science 168, 280-281 (1970)
7. S. W. Rabideau and A. E. Florin “Anomalous Water: Characterization by Physical Methods.” Science 169, 48-52 (1970)
8. G. A. Castellion, D. G. Grabar, J. Hession, and H. Burkhard “Polywater: Methods for Identifying Polywater Columns and Evidence for Ordered Growth.” Science 167, 865-868 (1970)
9. L. C. Allen and P. A. Kollman “A Theory of Anomalous Water” Science 167, 1443-1454 (1970)
10. J. W. Linnett “Structure of Polywater” Science 167, 1719-1720 (1970)
11. R. P. Messmer “Polywater: Possibility of p-Electron Delocalization.” Science 168, 479-480 (1970)
12. Derjaguin, B. V., and Churaev, N. V., “Nature of "Anomalous Water” Nature 244, 430 - 431 (1973)
13. C.J. Gruenloh, J.R. Carney, C.A. Arrington, T.S. Zwier, S.Y. Fredericks, K.D. Jordan
“Infrared Spectrum of a Molecular Ice Cube: The S4 and D2d Water Octamers in Benzene-(Water)8” Science 276 1678 – 1681 (1997)
14. C.J. Tsai and K.D. Jordan, "Theoretical Study of the (H20)6 Cluster," Chemical Physics Letters 213, 181-88 (1993).
15. C.J. Tsai and K.D. Jordan, "Theoretical Study of Small Water Clusters: Low-Energy Fused Cubic Structures for (H2O)n, n=8, 12, 16 and 20," Journal of Physical Chemistry 97, 5208-10 (1993)
I hope you enjoyed this nicely documented piece I just put together.
Because it is complete and utter horse shit.
Fedyakin was real. He, as far as I know, was a two bit polytechnic teacher not associated with the Soviet Defense forces in any way expect the way that every Academic was in that highly militarized society. And, by the way, in the Soviet Union it was "Ministry of Defense", not "Defense Department".
Derjaguin and Churaev did run with the discovery, and then tout their results in the West. Western scientists did try to reproduce the results and study the structure of the substance for about four years. However, and I skipped this part, there were plenty of problems reproducing the results. I selectively did not cite these skeptical article from the heyday of polywater research:
W. M. Madigosky “Polywater or Sodium Acetate?” Science 172, 264-265 (1971)
D. L. Rousseau “ ‘Polywater’ and Sweat: Similarities between the Infrared Spectra” Science 171, 170-172 (1971)
S. L. Kurtin, C. A. Mead, W. A. Mueller, B. C. Kurtin, and E. D. Wolf “‘Polywater’: A Hydrosol?” Science 167, 1720-1722 (1970)
By the early seventies, Western scientists had concluded that polywater, which had only ever been made in trace amounts, was actually water with a whole lot of impurities in it, which explained the change in viscosity and colligative properties.
In addition, unless you actually went to look up the last Derjaguin reference, you would not be aware that it was actually the publication where he finally recanted and admitted that the Western scientists were correct about the composition of polywater.
And what about the more recent papers I cited? Well, water can polymerize to a slight degree via various methods of attraction between the molecules. Small polymers, less than a few hundred repeating units long, are often referred to as oligomers, and small amounts of these in a water sample will not cause the viscosity or colligative property changes claimed for polywater. The polywater part of the above essay has NOTHING to do with the water cluster work I cited. I just wanted to make that clear because one of the authors of the legitimate papers is a very old and dear friend of mine.
So the next time someone comes citing papers that actually come to the opposite conclusion of that of the citing “authority” (cough James Blodgett cough*), remember this: Always go back and READ THE ORIGINAL SOURCE when someone is citing papers in a scientific argument. Also, when you see papers that are more than a few years old being cited, go back and check to see if there are retractions, arguments, or alternative explanations proposed in the literature. Just because an argument cites scientific publications, it does not necessarily follow that the argument is scientifically valid.
*Specifically this reference, which predicts black holes - in certain very unlikely scenarios of string theory - and also predicts their rapid decay. You can't have one without the other, the theory predicts both events, but that title "Black Hole Factories" doesn't give you a clue as to that conclusion, you need to go look up the paper for yourself to find it. Bad physicist, bad.
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