Happy Thanksgiving From The Chemist

I'd like to wish everyone a belated Happy Thanksgiving. And if you don't live in the U.S.A., then I wish that you have plenty to be thankful for. I certainly do.

I've been working hard on my manuscript, which is one reason I haven't posted more often as of late. Thanksgiving weekend was a fairly productive time, all things considered. No new chapters -- just massive revisions -- so I have no word count to report like everyone else seems to do on Twitter. Seriously, seeing tweets about the 3,000 words someone just wrote that evening does not improve my spirits. I'm happy for them, of course, but it gets a bit depressing sometimes.

Fortunately, I still enjoy working on this story and that's all that counts.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Ken

Antimatter Enthusiasts, Rejoice!

One of the topics I promised I would blog about is Chemistry.  After all, I am a chemist.  But after 40 posts, I haven’t blogged much about anything related to Chemistry, so promised myself I would stay up tonight until I wrote something that sounded at least vaguely scientific. Beware.  It's late and I've had some wine, so if the wording seems confused, at least I have a built-in excuse.

A month ago, I ran across an announcement that a research team at CERN, the European particle physics lab, had managed to produce and store antihydrogen (the antimatter equivalent of hydrogen) for over 16 minutes. Woo hoo! As antimatter is an integral part of many science fiction stories, I thought I’d mention it here.

Antimatter particles are old hat these days. Positrons, the antimatter equivalent of electrons, are used every day in hospitals during PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scans. Antiprotons are a bit more rare; mostly found in large particle accelerators like the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at CERN, where protons and antiprotons are whipped around very large racetracks at nearly the speed of light and then smashed into one other to see what happens. Pretty cool, eh?

Hydrogen consists of an electron orbiting a proton, so antihydrogen has a positron orbiting an antiproton. Antihydrogen has been made before, but it disintegrates immediately upon contact with matter so it ain't easy to work with. The big news is that these scientists have come up with a device for holding antihydrogen in a stable form for much longer periods of time.  Sixteen minutes may not seen all that long, but in the antimatter world, it's an eternity.

It’s only a matter of time before we’ll be able to buy this stuff at Costco.

Hilarious Amazon Reviews

Not much writing happened this weekend. I mostly worked out in the garden. Man was it hot!

Anyway, here is a link to PCWorld's top 15 hilarious Amazon reviews. Enjoy.

Life As a Chemist

I want to be a writer someday, but right now most of my working time is spent being a chemist. For the most part, nothing much exciting happens where I work, but we did have a bit of action the other day.

Unfortunately, I was the one responsible for all the excitement.

I do research on fuel cells and one of the more common fuels for these devices is hydrogen. So when I disconnected one of our test systems without completely shutting down the fuel stream, the escaping hydrogen set off the laboratory alarm.

There was no danger involved. Hydrogen can be explosive when sufficient quantities build up in a closed area, but the amount I was leaking was almost a thousand times below that limit. Unfortunately, the nearby carbon monoxide sensor is also sensitive to hydrogen and its alarm level is set at a much, much lower level, so the alarm went off when it shouldn’t have. Inconvenient, but better to be safe than sorry.

Normally this wouldn’t have been any problem. Just a few flashing lights in our lab to let us know there was a leak. However, the company had just recently tied our room’s alarm system into the building’s main alarm system and so an “evacuate the building” message was broadcast throughout the entire building. Thank goodness it wasn’t raining that day.

Although the matter was quickly resolved and everyone brought back inside, I did have to explain all this to the chief engineer for the project. No fun!

Who ever said chemistry was all fun and games?

Air Traffic Patterns

This video has nothing to do with writing, but it's interesting and I need to stall for time while I'm working on the real post.

It's a 24 hour map of the flight paths of all large planes compressed into a couple of minutes. Notice the patterns as day and night sweep across the planet.

Congratulations to William and Catherine

The title says it all. No I'm not British, but as an confirmed Anglophile, I sometimes wish I were.

I don't know if any of you saw the ceremony, but I caught most of it, and although the commentators were mostly concerned with who was wearing what, I was far more interested in the views of Westminster Abbey. Man, that place is magnificent! I've been there in person, but some of the views from the more strategically placed cameras were just awesome.

It's no secret I'm fascinated with old buildings, castles, and ruins in general. Just can't get enough of them. It's one of the reasons I'm I'm writing a story based around Hogwarts.

Sigh. I wouldn't mind retiring in Britain some day. Perhaps if I make a ton of money writing fiction....

Yet Another Periodic Table!

What's with all the periodic tables having to do with writing these days? Now from Let The Words Flow I find out about the Periodic Table of Storytelling. When will the madness end?

Heating Vent Zombies

Yes! We hit 80 degrees yesterday here in Michigan. Must have brought this awesome weather back with us from Florida. If we're lucky, this may just mean the end of heating vent zombies.

A Periodic Table for Writers

I came across this post at Janet Reid's blog today, and as a chemist, I just couldn't resist mentioning it here. Someone has put together a Periodic Table of Typefaces which is just gorgeous and fun to read.

Here's a picture of the English version.



Go and check it out.

Merry Christmas

I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas. Ours was good, although my wife and I didn’t get as much sleep as we would have liked. First of all, I was in a writing groove on Christmas Eve and didn’t stop writing until 1:45 in the morning. And the only reason I quit was because I knew my eight year old son had set his alarm for 2:15 so that he could sneak downstairs with his flashlight and check whether there were any presents under the tree. We had given him permission to do this (fools that we were); with the proviso that he not wake us if he found anything.

Of course, he was so excited by the presents he couldn’t go back to sleep and, of course, he had to wake us up in order to inform us of this fact. Eventually he ended up in bed with us, but he was still too excited to fall asleep for another two hours, which meant neither my wife nor I got much sleep either. Never again.

Again, Merry Christmas!

Finals Week is Over!

Today marks the last day of Finals Week at the college where I teach an evening course in chemistry. I’m sure the students are relieved it is all over, but I suspect many of the instructors are having exactly the same thoughts. Count me as one of them. I enjoyed teaching the class, but it could be a lot of work at times and I’m glad for the break. I met many interesting students during the course and I would like to thank them for making my job that much easier. Last night was the final exam for my class and it saddened me to think that I probably won’t see any of my students again.

But I’m sure I’ll get over it.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Anyway, here are two miscellaneous links that I thought I’d share with you.

First, MarketingHackz has a list of ten amusing advertising/marketing goofs where translation problems foiled the attempts of companies trying to expand into foreign markets. Classic!

Second, a link to more pictures of Liu Bolin, the artist who hides in plain sight.