Piles of paper surround me. Wrapping paper for presents. Your exams and lab reports. (Not to worry, no one in the family received socks wrapped in a lab report.) And it’s snowing. So what do I do?
What would anyone do?
Surf for distractions, of course.
A student emailed me this song from Science Groove: Hooray for NMR Spectroscopy! (http://www.science-groove.org/Now/Hooray_lofi.mp3)
I also watched the winners of Gonzo Labs & AAAS/Science magazine 2009 Dance Your Ph.D. Contest. My personal faves: the Sue Lynn Lau & group on the left (good music, joyful sunshine, capoeira moves) and Vince LiCata with red-shirted subunits on center right (watch for Old Man Winter as a cryogenic cooler). Check it out!
Maybe Reed should have a “Dance Your Non-dance Thesis” contest? (To make this fair, dance majors would have to sing their theses.) Got any nerdy web material to share? Post a comment or just say “hi”.
Matt M sent me this email today:
“I hope you’re enjoying the break and the holidays. I was amused by the latest blog and the invitation to share “nerdy web material” reminded me of the book “The Periodic Table.” I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, but the book is tremendously interesting as a literary endeavor and in its ability to anthropomorphize elements.
Essentially, Primo Levi, the author and former chemist, arranged the book in twenty different chapters each named after a specific element. He takes the physical proprieties of an element and constructs a metaphor intertwining the properties with a personal narrative. For instance, the first chapter is Argon, and in it, he describes his relatives as similar to the noble, inert gases in their stubbornness and reluctance to make decisions. You might, as an organic chemist, be interested in the last chapter Carbon where he tries to describe “the poetry of a single carbon atom.” Anyways, I thought it’d be worth sharing as a potential future read.”