In Search of Cell History

I’ve slowly worked my way through In Search of Cell History by Franklin Harold, professor emeritus at Colorado State University. The subtitle of the book is The Evolution of Life’s Building Blocks. The focus of the book is on the cell as the building block or “atomic unit” of life, and tracing cell evolution through the three main branches of the phylogenetic tree: Bacteria, Archaea and Eukarya. Based on the similarities and differences among the three branches, Harold speculates on the nature of the cell underlying the tree’s root, the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA).

Harold does several important things in this book. He re-emphasizes the importance of cell theory: “Cells are the atoms of life, and life is what cells do.” He also builds upon Virchow’s dictum: “Every cell from a previous cell.” Modern molecular biology's focus on genes and the genome as the most important players in the deciphering of life is counter-balanced by Harold emphasizing the crucial role played by the cell and its internal organization that distinguishes life from non-life. He also carefully presents the evidence comparing and contrasting Bacteria, Archaea and Eukarya. Although Bacteria and Archaea are prokaryotes and share many similar structural and organizational features (as viewed through a microscope), their molecular constituents show large differences. Harold also discusses the role and evidence of lateral gene transfer at the microbial level and the nature of viruses, along with how these contribute to the complicated lineages near the roots of the “tree of life”.

Eukaryotes are an enigma. On some level, they share characteristics of both Archaea and Bacteria. Harold writes that while Bacteria and Archaea can be separated distinctly by the differences in their ribosomal RNA, “the essential unity of eukaryotes is indisputable; the devil is in their diversity”. For example, the genetic core of eukaryotes shares many similarities to Archaea, but the plasma membranes are akin to those of Bacteria. The seemingly more complex eukaryotes use the very inefficient mechanism of glycolysis for their energy needs. Prokaryotes, on the other hand, are highly diversified and make use of respiration and photosynthesis, much more efficient metabolic systems. Somewhere in deep history, the precursor to the eukaryotes “swallowed” prokaryotes leading to what seems like a mutually beneficial relationship. Mitochondria in our cells that generate ATP (our energy currency) resemble relics of bacteria. Chloroplasts in plant cells that run photosynthesis look remarkably like cyanobacteria.

In Chapter 10, Harold tackles the origin of life. He first sets up practical constraints to the scientific problem, i.e., “[assuming] that life originated here on earth by a natural and probable outgrowth of the chemical and physical circumstances prevailing some four billion years ago.” Given this starting point, “the origin of life can therefore be construed as a problem in geochemistry; but it is also the black hole at the root of biological organization, and there’s the rub.” That is the rub indeed! Harold writes that “a survey of the literature devoted to the beginnings of life leaves one in no doubt that all the critical questions remain open.” I agree with this statement because on my last sabbatical I decided to learn something new and read as much as I could about the chemical origins of life. As a scientist, I also read Harold's statement in a positive light, i.e., there is plenty of room for plenty of interesting scientific work. (I wrote about this topic briefly in an earlier post about the nature of research.) I still try to keep up with the latest research but I admit that I’m falling behind thanks to my administrative duties.

I will leave more detailed discussion about the chemical origins of life to later posts. Instead I will speculate on a point that Harold makes about the enigma of eukaryotes and the rise of multi-cellularity – the evolution of more complex organisms made up of large collections of differentiated cells rather than a single-celled organism. Harold (citing Lane and Martin) suggests that a consequence of eukaryotes incorporating much more efficient energy transducers by “eating” prokaryotes (thereby obtaining chloroplasts and/or mitochondria) could be what leads to multi-celled organisms. Now that the energy needs are taken care of, the organism can evolve into something more complex with specialized parts that contribute not just to survival but rather to growth and propagation.

One could speculate that Harold’s suggestion is the second time this “great leap forward” has taken place. The first time was the “evolution” of LUCA, by incorporating simple energy transducers within a primitive genetic and metabolic framework. The organism that is able to incorporate a more efficient energy transducer will outcompete all others and at this point we can invoke the mechanisms of biological evolution that give rise to the diversity of life.

The speculated third leap forward comes from an intriguing suggestion by Richard Wrangham in his book CatchingFire: How Cooking Made Us Human. (If you do a search, don’t just use “Catching Fire” because you’ll be inundated with the second book in the Hunger Games trilogy.) Wrangham speculates that cooking foods allowed for much more efficient energy transduction, thereby transforming the human brain and society leading in a sense to the next step of evolution beyond mere survival. Before cooking, subsistence through food requiring lots of chewing left little energy to do anything else.

Perhaps the fourth leap forward was the industrial revolution coupled with the taming of electricity. Our plethora of time-and-energy-saving electrical devices free us of having to use large amounts of our own energy and allow us to lead more complex lives. (We could have chosen more leisure instead – I wrote about this briefly when discussing the book Free Time.) And now with computers, and electronic devices of all sorts, we have started to become cyborgian. As we store more of our information on dedicated “cloud” services, it seems we are recapitulating the eukaryotic solution – sequestering the information we need into a specialized nucleus. Our complex lives now extend far beyond our (flesh and blood) cells and are stored/accessed in our digital toys; some of us might be so strongly dependent on our devices that we cannot imagine living without them. Is this the fifth leap forward?

Humans are quite the enigma among living beings. We have even come up with the word “enigma” to allude to what we ponder but do not understand.

Bagman and Crouch: How Not to be Department Head

It’s funny how you notice new things when re-reading a book. What jumped out at me reading through the Goblet of Fire this time around were the characteristics of Ludo Bagman and Barty Crouch. They are both introduced as Ministry of Magic Department Heads early in the book. New Hogwarts alum Percy Weasley who works in Crouch’s department is discussing aspects of his job with his father Arthur (also a Ministry employee). Percy says that they are not getting the support of Bagman’s department and is about to say something about Bagman when his father interrupts.  Arthur Weasley says he likes Ludo, and that Ludo got them the good World Cup tickets as a return favor for getting his brother out of a tight spot.

Percy’s response: “Oh Bagman’s likable enough… but how he ever got to be Head of Department when I compare him to Mr. Crouch! I don’t see Mr. Crouch losing a member of our department and not trying to find out what’s happened to them.” Percy then goes on to describe Bagman as being nonchalant and seemingly unworried, and in fact joking about the missing person misreading a map and getting lost. On the other hand, Percy idolizes Crouch and seems to think he is the best and greatest Head of Department ever.

Chapter 7 in Book 4 is titled “Bagman and Crouch”. This is where Harry meets the two men who couldn’t be more different from one another. Bagman shows up first. He is a former international athlete with a “rosy complexion” and looks like “an overgrown schoolboy”. He does not follow the Ministry dress code to look like a Muggle at the World Cup campgrounds. He is enthusiastic, happy-go-lucky, somewhat clueless as to what is going on, somewhat irresponsible (as he is trying to be a bookie on the match), and very friendly. He is well-liked (except perhaps for the people trying to get work done who have to run around covering for him), enjoys chatting with people, and seems to be socially adept.

Crouch appears next, and is described as a “stiff, upright, elderly man, dressed in an impeccable crisp suit and tie”. Crouch is also very well groomed and “Harry could see why Percy idolized [Crouch]. Percy was a great believer in rigidly following rules and Mr. Crouch had complied with the rule about Muggle dressing so thoroughly…” Crouch is introduced as being impatient, efficient, work-focused in his conversation, careful to make well-qualified statements, very knowledgeable, and a stickler for regulation. Later in the book we learn that Crouch is powerful, talented, very ambitious, and that he badly treats those who stand in his way particularly if they are his inferiors.

As I was reading about Crouch in Chapter 7, the word “Grouch” came to mind. Crouch the Grouch. Very good and efficient at what he does, and does not deal well with incompetency or disloyalty. Now I happen to prize highly being efficient and doing my job competently (preferably with excellence). I’d like to think I’m knowledgeable and talented too. And one thing I did notice when I became Department Chair is that my conversations with my colleagues the first couple of months were almost exclusively work-related and they were short and crisp, because I was trying to be efficient. Being laden with the extra administrative work, I would run meetings very efficiently because I don’t want to waste the time of my colleagues (who are also very busy). It takes a lot of legwork and preparation to run an efficient meeting so that it is tight, focused and things get done. I think I’m now a little better with “loosening up” and making more of an effort to continue having those relationship-building conversations I used to have before I became Chair.

I’m not at all like Bagman. I’m introverted and tend to avoid social events with larger groups of people. I don’t exude friendliness or charm. And unlike Bagman, at work, I am on top of things for the most part. (My colleagues would describe me as being very efficient in my work.) I certainly don’t want to be like Crouch in his rigidity and efficiency, and lack of care for people, particularly if they are not as “efficient” as I would prefer them to be. My predecessors worked hard in creating a culture within the department that makes it a joy to come to work. I need to continue in that vein, although the department is a lot more complicated now than it was when I first joined. I now oversee almost 40 faculty and staff; we have more than doubled in size. Our number of majors have doubled, our class offerings have doubled, we have way more equipment and chemicals to deal with, we have much more external grant dollars, and administrative burdens and regulations have increased significantly.

Another way I am not like Crouch is that I do not have ambitions to ascend the power ladder. I actually have no interest in being a Department Head. I’d much rather focus on the direct education of my students, however right now it is optimum for my department that I take on the role as Chair. I am pleased to be part of a high-functioning department so this is not an onerous task and I am not laden with department infighting and politics. In fact I work with a great group of folks! It’s still very, very busy administrative work though. Managing class/teaching schedules and budgets is probably one of my largest tasks even with administrative staff support. I find myself reading and signing lots of forms. I have now developed a more efficient scrawl and I no longer write out the date in full (as I used to). I’m not as happy with the time and energy I’ve put into teaching my classes while being chair (i.e. I could do better). Making forward progress in research and managing an undergraduate-only research group is not easy with the time constraints.

That being said, there are highlights to being department chair: I get to announce faculty, student and staff awards and achievements. It’s particularly gratifying because I usually get to make a small contribution in a letter of support. Writing these letters remind me how lucky I am to be working with fine colleagues and great students! By running the department smoothly and efficiently, and behind-the-scenes as much as possible, I allow my faculty to thrive by giving them the time, space and energy (and resources where possible, even those are tight) to do excellent work. There is less of the immediate gratification from teaching more students in class and in the research lab, but that’s okay. Maybe I’ll even get used to it after a while. (I haven’t been chair long enough to love the job. However I don’t hate it, which is probably the more important thing right now.)

Since I hope not to emulate Bagman or Crouch, who might be a better role model? Dumbledore, of course! Dumbledore seems to know how to respond to issues with the right measure. Instead of rigidly trying to control what happens, he allows people to make mistakes but gives appropriate guidance, encouragement and support. He is generous with his time and energy, and patiently supports his teaching staff. Dumbledore could well have become a Department Head in the Ministry of Magic, and could even have become Minister of Magic (equivalent to the Prime Minister or the executive/operational leader of a country). But instead he chose to spend his time in the education of Hogwarts students.

Biology and Magical Consumables

This past week I have been reading up on molecular and cell biology. As a chemist, who is interested in the origin of life, it behooves me to educate myself in areas outside my field of expertise. This is part of why I make the effort to learn more biology, physics, geoscience and complex systems. Another part of the reason could be that as a proponent of a liberal arts education leading to life-long learning, I should practice what I preach and keep learning. However, the part that keeps me going is that I simply find it fun to learn new things. The very fascinating cell represents the basic building block or unit of life. Omnis cellula e cellula (“all cells come from other cells”) was Rudolf Virchow’s famous aphorism back in 1855.

The confluence of writing a blog, reading biology and reading Harry Potter, leads to interesting thoughts and associations. This has been an enjoyable and unexpected effect of starting the blog. I’ve now made connections (some tenuous) among different fields and have come up with all sorts of ideas (some crazy) that I can bat around.

So, what do the following three things have in common from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire? Ton-Tongue Toffee. Polyjuice Potion. Gillyweed.

In case you haven’t read the book (gasp!) let’s summarize what happens when these three items are “consumed”. When Harry’s cousin, the greedy Dudley, eats Ton-Tongue Toffee, his tongue grows at an alarming rate in both size and mass. Polyjuice Potion is used to change one’s appearance to that of another person. An important ingredient of the potion is a “body part” (e.g. hair or fingernail) of the person one is changing into. When Harry chews gillyweed it allows him to “grow” gills to breathe underwater, in addition to webbing between his toes and fingers allowing him to swim quickly and smoothly.

From the book it is clear that the potion and gillyweed are both temporary effects, i.e., after some time the effects wear off and the user returns to his or her original state. The effects of the toffee are magically reversed quickly by Arthur Weasley, father of the Weasley twins who are the co-inventors of the toffee. The twins also invented Canary Creams, which when eaten, turn one temporarily into a canary. After a while the canary moults to reveal the person who ate it restored to normal. By analogy, the toffee's effects might also be temporary.

Genetically-modified foods have sometimes been dubbed “frankenfoods” (after Frankenstein’s monster) and the wilder speculations describe monstrous deformities affecting the consumer. Given that scientists studying the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster have successfully genetically reprogrammed mutants to sprout (or I should say develop) extra eyes, wings, legs, antennae, in parts other than their “natural” state, it is easy to paint a picture of creating “monsters” through eating genetically-engineered foods. In the fruit fly mutants, these deformities are typically permanent if one has modified the genetic code that programs the development of its body parts. This is similar to when Peter Parker gets bitten by the spider and becomes Spider-Man. In the newer 2012 movie The Amazing Spider-Man, cross-species genetics features as a prominent theme. The main antagonist, Dr. Curt Connors, makes use of reptile/lizard genes in an effort to regrow his missing limb. The initial dose is temporary, i.e., the lizard transforms back into Connors after some time.

In genetically-modified foods, direct changes are made to the DNA of the organism. The result of this change is that the DNA can now code for proteins that enhance the organism in some way (usually to prevent disease or predation in crops). Another way to make changes is through viral infection. In this case, the virus hijacks the cellular and metabolic machinery of its host to replicate the viral DNA allowing the virus to proliferate. This change is not permanent in the sense that the host organism’s DNA is not modified. Perhaps this is how the Polyjuice Potion works. A viral solution amplifies the DNA of the person being changed into (obtained from the fingernail or hair) with great speed, but the effects are temporary.

The Ton-Tongue Toffee on the other hand resembles what some cancerous cells may do, i.e., they keep replicating themselves and grow out of control. Anything that disrupts the cell cycle machinery and messes up the timing of cell division and growth, can be cancer-causing. The toffee may have certain molecules that recognize and target tongue cells and then cause them to multiply unrestrained. In this case, the DNA of the host does not necessarily need modification. Instructions to the cell to replicate non-stop are sufficient. DNA is the blueprint in this case, but does not necessarily direct the show.

In a delightful and very readable book, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5 Billion Year History of the Human Body, the biologist/paleontologist Neil Shubin connects the human body plan to evolutionarily older body plans including ancient fish. (Apparently there’s a TV series too, which I haven’t watched so I cannot vouch for it personally.) While a marquee example is the connection between the fins of the ancient Tiktaalik and human arms, fish gills also come up as part of the story. Apparently human muscles, nerves and bones, used in speech correspond to gill structures in fish; and apparently you can find people with a “gill hole” above their ears. (I have not successfully seen this since it might be rude to get up close and stare at someone’s ear area.) Now there might be some fishy genes in our human DNA that can be easily turned on by Hox genes or the homeobox, important in directing organismal development. If so, maybe chewing on gillyweed releases the appropriate molecules that activate our fishy genes. Alternatively, this could be triggered the same way Curt Connors a.k.a. Lizard acquired temporary reptilian characteristics.

The purpose of this mental escapade is not to try and “explain” how things work in the Harry Potter universe. Clearly I am also outside my scientific area of expertise as my own research does not overlap much with extant biochemistry (yet). Rather, I think it is interesting that magical folks use magical “spells”, but they also make use of a continuum of objects, some of which may be “naturally” magical, and others might be imbued with magic (as in an object intentionally charmed by a wizard or witch). The boundary of what is natural and unnatural (perhaps monstrous) is no longer as clear in our world. The boundary between organic chemistry and inorganic chemistry is not so easy to define. Is there a similar blurring of the lines between magic and nonmagic? What is it about Care of Magical Creatures or Herbology that makes a living species a magical one, or one with magical properties?

The short, and perhaps unsatisfying, answer: More fodder for my blog.

GPS and the Marauder's Map

There is a large jump in book thickness when going from Book 3 to Book 4 in the Harry Potter series. Therefore I’ve been slowly working my way through Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, reading a couple of chapters each night, instead of trying to read the entire book in one sitting.

A Mary GrandPre illustration of the Marauder’s Map

Where magical objects are concerned, the Marauder’s Map, first introduced in Book 3, also plays an important role in Book 4. The map covers Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, in particular showing dormitories, classrooms, passageways, offices, and more. In addition, the map also shows the location of everyone in the school in real time with their names attached to the map. The third movie does a masterful job representing footprints along with associated nametags when the map is being used.

When I first read about the Marauder’s Map (late ‘90s), I remember thinking what a useful object it was (and I “solemnly swear” that I would use it only when I was “up to no good”). If only it existed in reality. Fifteen or so years later GPS is ubiquitous in smartphones. Not to mention the obvious: smartphones are ubiquitous too. (Back then PDAs were just starting to get popular, but they had not quite combined with mobile phones.) So if everyone carried their GPS-enabled smartphone with geo-tagging on, we could all have our own Marauder’s Map. Not surprisingly, there’s an App for that! Several in fact; you can go download one or more on to your smartphone right now. With wearable technology and personal tracking making headlines – the FitBit Surge has built-in GPS amongst a battery of other trackers – we are perhaps not too far from the dystopian future of having such technology involuntarily embedded into every person. And I'm sure it will be solemnly used for no good.

How does GPS work? Your receiver contacts orbiting satellites and uses trilateration (sort of like triangulation but different) to determine your position. The communication between your GPS and the satellite makes use of radio waves, i.e., long wavelength electromagnetic (EM) radiation. Time synchronization and relative error correction is factored into a calculation, and ta-da, you can now locate yourself almost instantaneously! All this is thanks to electronic devices in your GPS-smartphone and on the satellites. And what are electronic devices? They are simply technological gadgets designed to harness and use electricity.

In Book 3, as part of her Muggle Studies class, Hermione works on an essay titled “Explain Why Muggles Need Electricity”. I’ve been thinking about the relationship between Magic and EM radiation, and that magic is a means of manipulating EM radiation that wizards and witches are capable of, but that Muggles and Squibs are unable to do so. Instead Muggles have built technology around electricity, electronics and electromagnetic radiation. (I wonder if this was how Hermione structured her essay.) EM radiation when appropriately channeled does wonders, in GPS, LEDs, DVDs, and a whole host of other acronyms. Too much or uncontrolled EM radiation renders the devices inoperable, hence the standard EM pulse to disrupt electronics in sci-fi storylines.

In Book 4, when discussing the subject of how Rita Skeeter may be listening in on conversations, Harry suggests that bugs (microphones and recording equipment) might be used. Hermione interrupts: “All those substitutes for magic Muggles use – electricity, computers, and radar, and all those things – they all go haywire around Hogwarts, there’s too much magic in the air.” Is this why the Wizarding world and the Muggle world have "split" into two different tracks? One uses magic, the other uses electronics, electricity and electromagnetism. It was only just shy of 200 years ago that Faraday invented the electric motor. Someone who had not encountered electrical devices would wonder at how they worked. It would be like magic! The “operator” of such devices would be a magician or a wizard or a witch! Perhaps magic and science are not so different after all.

Finals Week: An Excellent Beginning!

It’s Finals Week! I am just giving one Final Exam this time around – first semester General Chemistry. I’m all set, that is, I’ve written and taken my exam. My usual strategy for exams I’ve given is to write the exam at least a week ahead of time. Then I wait a couple of days to allow my brain buffer to clear. I then take the exam “cold” either first thing in the morning or right after lunch when I’m a little sleepy. I have to be able to complete the exam in a third of the time I am giving the students. By complete, I mean writing out the complete solution set that can be eventually given to students after I grade and hand exams back. This means actually writing things out legibly and coherently instead of the scrawls that I sometimes get from students (which skip steps and loses points).

Finals week has a different schedule because time blocks of 2 hours are allotted. My usual class meets MWF for an hour (really 55 minutes). Since the final exam is cumulative and therefore covers more material, I usually make it a little shorter so the students don’t feel the time pressure. It took me slightly under 30 minutes to take the two-hour exam so that should work well. In any case, students are stressed as usual and studying away. I wrote the following e-mail to my class this morning to help them not stress out so much.

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Hi, folks -

Since I’ve had some questions about the nature of the Final exam, here are my answers for everybody.

1. The Final Exam is cumulative and will cover material equally spread out over the semester, i.e., there won’t be one topic strongly privileged over another. Clearly anything I went through in class is more important than anything I didn’t cover much in class (but is in your textbook).

2. The Final Exam isn’t written to be harder than the Exams you’ve had so far. It’s at about the same level in terms of expectation. So since you’ve had three exams already, you have an idea of what this level is.

3. To balance the fact that the exam covers more material, it is actually written as a 90-minute exam although you will have 120 minutes to complete it. This means that most of you will actually finish early with time to spare. It doesn’t mean you will answer the questions correctly necessarily, but you won’t feel the time pressure as you did in previous exams. (Previous 55-minute exams that were tight and really aimed at 55 minutes.)

4. My office hours this week are: Mon 1-2pm, Tue 12:30-2:30pm, Wed, 9:30-11:30am. This takes advantage of in-between final exam times to maximize your ability to visit if you have questions.

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My final exam is on Wednesday afternoon so I expect to spend all day Thursday grading, and hopefully I’ll be done by day’s end. Unless I have a Time-Turner, of course. Then I might be able to work some magic. But WAIT! Guess what happened today?

The highlight of my day at work was when one of my students (who is a senior this year) came by this afternoon to drop off a thank-you card and gift. I wrote her a bunch of recommendation letters for grad school (Ph.D. programs). She’s an excellent student and already has acceptance offers coming in (which is fantastic). Anyway, the gift is a Time-Turner! She says it is to help me get through grading my Finals. This is very fitting given my earlier blog post on the use of Time Turners under a strangely narrow set of circumstances. In honor of the gift, Hufflepuff Hippo will pose with his new Time Turner and (still relatively) new wizard hat (sewn by my super-talented better half)!

To top things off, I had another brainwave today. Last week I was chatting with another senior student who was in my second semester Honors General Chemistry class three years ago. I found out that she is interested in going into teaching chemistry at the high school level. (I almost did this myself but ended up teaching college instead – it’s an interesting story but for another time.) Anyway, I was looking over some of the material for next semester’s class. If you have been following my blog you will know that I had posted an open letter to my students about wanting to approach the Honors General Chemistry class very differently. While I know that it’s going to be a lot of work on my part to pull this off, it will be of great benefit to the students (I think). Well, today I thought that I should ask this senior student if she wants to participate in putting together the class as my hybrid research-and-teaching assistant. I have a nice external research grant that has flexibility allowing me to use the funds creatively so I can now offer my student a paid assistantship, which is the least I can do if she’s going to put in the hours and work with me on this project. I’m meeting her tomorrow to pitch the idea and see if we can find an arrangement that works, and if she has enough time to participate. So I might get some help, the student gets some training, and the class might even go better especially if we have lots of in-class small group work (which I'm planning).

So I’m now excited about grading my Finals and getting to work on my next semester’s class! An excellent start to Finals week – I hope it ends well too. We’ll see.

Freedom, Leisure and the Liberal Arts

I just finished reading FreeTime: The Forgotten American Dream by Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt. The back cover of the book describes the author as “an historian and professor”. In the book’s conclusion, the author describes himself as a “professor of leisure studies following the educational tradition represented by Robert Maynard Hutchins and Dorothy Canfield Fisher”.

The first part of this self-description is why I wanted to read the book in the first place. I had read a news article mentioning the book and author, but what jumped out at me was that he was a professor of “leisure studies”. As a professor of chemistry who as department chair has to worry about the complexity of running a department with chemicals, equipment and laboratories, I sometimes wonder if I should be in a different field, perhaps a “simpler” one. This is why I got the book. I wanted to know what a professor of leisure studies does. In my wild imagination, I picture him leisurely musing about the subject of leisure.

The second part of his self-description, learning about the educational tradition of Hutchins in particular, was very eye-opening and got me thinking hard about the nature of a liberal arts education. I found the first part of the book quite a slog as the author goes through the history starting with Jonathan Edwards through to the Labor Movement and Roosevelt’s “Salvation by Works” New Deal. It is clear that Professor Hunnicutt did not whittle the hours away in leisure while doing his research and writing the book. He is thorough and detailed, and my impression of him changed to imagining a professor very hard at work. The book is rather academic in nature, and as a non-historian who isn’t particular drawn to labor relations in America, I considered just giving up on it several times. After all, this was my 20 minutes of leisure-reading before bedtime. Why should it be such a slog? It wasn’t until I got to Chapter 7 that I’m very glad I persevered. The story of Robert Maynard Hutchins and the “Rise and Fall of Leisure and the Liberal Arts” was fascinating and really got me thinking about the parallels between the contemporary assault on the liberal arts and what was happening in Hutchins’ time. (I had trouble sleeping that night because my mind was all abuzz with ideas.) In what follows I will be quoting extensively from Hunnicutt’s book.

The book traces the history of labor demands for shorter working hours given technological progress and the rise of the machine. It starts with a quote from John Maynard Keynes about the dilemma and challenge of how “Man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest have won for him, to live wisely, agreeably and well.” How should one live wisely, agreeably and well? That is a question undergirding a liberal arts education (or certainly should, I hope). Clearly now in 2014 we have seen technological leaps in labor-saving devices, but it seems we are now obsessed and trapped by a culture of work.

Hutchins, like Keynes, believed that “modern nations were now capable of producing more than enough of the basic necessities for all their peoples, [and that] modern economies have shifted from scarcity to abundance.” As president and then chancellor of the University of Chicago through the Great Depression, World War II, and the postwar period, Hutchins had seen the focus of education on “preparing students to for making a living and developing industrial power”. He was determined to revive the vision of education for leisure going back to the Greeks, i.e., that “the liberal arts were by definition, the arts (and skills) of freedom”. In The Great Conversation, Hutchins writes that the “substitution of machines for slaves gives us an opportunity to build a civilization as glorious as that of the Greeks, and far more lasting because far more just.” Furthermore “that mechanization which tends to reduce a man to a robot also supplies the economic base and the leisure that will enable him to get a liberal education and to become truly a man.”

Hunnicutt draws a parallel between Hutchins’ ideas (in the University of Utopia) and his role as a reformer of liberal arts education, and its primary role to “educate for freedom”. Hutchins was deeply against the distribution system where students chose their “core liberal arts” classes from a buffet, a practice most widespread in American colleges and universities. There was also the proliferation of departments and majors in every conceivable field to train for very specialized jobs. Faculty no longer understood what any of their colleagues outside of their narrow fields were doing. This sounds very familiar to what we see today. Hunnicutt describes the university as “reflecting its surrounding culture: keenly competitive, selfish, quarrelsome, petulant, and confused.”

Since “the object of education is to prepare for more education”, Hutchins reformed the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Chicago into a two-year well-defined liberal arts core curriculum, as opposed to the buffet of options. The vestiges of his effort still exist today although the U of C (my spouse is an alumna) is no longer all that different from other institutions. In focusing on adult education through libraries and the Great Books of the Western World project, Hutchins had a vision of communities engaging in more education and learning “how to live well” in their newfound leisure time as technology marches ever forward.

It is interesting to compare the “education for work” rather than “education for freedom” arguments and counter-arguments then and now. For those who read higher education news, the assault on the liberal arts is one of the crises facing colleges and universities today. Should higher education be primarily for vocational training? (That’s the big worry of students, parents and politicians in the current U.S. economy.) Defenders of the liberal arts claim that “critical thinking” is a hallmark of a liberal arts curriculum. Employers supposedly want it. Do our universities actually teach it? (I’m not sure if politicians want it. Much easier to sway the masses with political posturing otherwise.) Defenders of the liberal arts claim that specific vocational training is too narrow given how fast things are changing, and that the liberal arts prepares one to adapt for the jobs of many tomorrows rather than the jobs of today which will quickly go obsolete.

The last 20 years have also seen large-scale changes in the globalization of higher education. While the U.S. has been arguing about needing more job-preparedness and moving away from traditional liberal arts curricula, other countries are looking for models that might replicate Silicon Valley, the supposed epitome of creativity and innovation. Liberal arts American-style curricula are being imported by the rest of the world in the hope that this will bring their countries and economies to the next level. Education and innovation hubs are being set up. Governments and private foundations are putting in large amounts of funding and infrastructure to attract partners as they tout an education that will give you the creative cutting edge to thrive in a global economy. There is even a new liberal arts college located in Singapore, Yale-NUS College, a collaboration between Yale University and the National University of Singapore, that features a well-defined liberal arts common curriculum in the first two years, akin to what Hutchins conceived, but featuring a more global view.

At the end of his book, Hunnicutt describes himself as “not content with the role of an objective observer”. In his research, he hopes “to reveal the implicit assumptions” of those who “assume that perpetual economic growth and the expansion of government to produce new jobs [is] normative – representing the essential values of our culture for which there are no reasonable, moral, or historical alternatives.” Reading this book made me think about this entire system many of us feel caught in. Is it even possible to get out of the cycle? Not just as individuals who may simply choose to work less for less renumeration if one can afford it. As a proponent of a liberal arts education (I had better be since I make my living as a liberal arts college professor), how can I do my part not just in talking about education for freedom, but actually living it if indeed this is an ideal I should aspire to? That will be the subject of a future post.

In the meantime, I recommend you read Hunnicutt's book if this is a topic you find interesting!

Nature Open Access and the nature of research

This past week, the Nature Publishing Group which publishes the very prestigious Nature journal announced that 49 titles (including Nature) will be free to read. In the sciences, reading journal articles is the bread and butter of keeping up with cutting-edge research. Costs of these journal subscriptions, however, have skyrocketed over the past decade. This has led to the growth of different "open access" options, some more complicated than the others. The libraries of smaller colleges in particular have had to cut back on their access to journals simply because continuing to pay for the subscriptions was unsustainable. This makes it more difficult for both students and faculty to quickly find what they need. Inter Library Loan (ILL) is what I use if my university's library does not have access to the article I am looking for. At the moment, I am not paying for the ILL service and libraries foot the bill. Therefore I try to be judicious in deciding whether I really need to read the article to help keep costs down.

The internet was buzzing when this announcement came out on Dec 2. Since open access means different things to different people, there was plenty of interpretation (and misinterpretation) of what this move meant. Interestingly, three days later the announcement had to be amended so as to clarify the limits of what all this actually meant. The bottom of the article reads: "Corrected: The original headline on this article gave an exaggerated impression of the way in which content from Nature journals can now be accessed. As the story makes clear, read-only sharing must be facilitated by a subscriber."

The week before this announcement, as part of my reading more widely developments in my field of chemistry, I came across an interesting article in Nature Communications (which became "fully" open access on Oct 20). The article, titled "Emergence of single-molecule chirality from achiral reactants", is interesting because it could shed light on the origin of handedness in the molecules of life. What is this handedness?

 

(Image taken from phys.org)

Because we live in three-dimensional space, it turns out that any molecule possessing a carbon atom connected to four different chemical groups has a chiral center. The picture above shows the general picture of a standard amino acid (alpha amino acid, if you want to be technical). The two molecules shown are mirror images of one another but non-superimposable, just like your hands. They are chemically identical in every way unless they interact with other chiral molecules. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. Living organisms only use the left-handed version in proteins. This is puzzling because it is unclear at life's origin why only the left-handed versions are used.

In his most famous experiment that kicked off the whole field of origin-of-life research (published in Nature's rival famous journal Science in 1953), Stanley Miller had mixed very simple chemicals you might find on the primordial earth (methane, ammonia, water, hydrogen gas). A source of energy was provided through an electric spark to kick off the reaction. A week later amino acids were found in the mixture! Now here's the important part: The amino acids were made in equal amounts of the right and left handed version. In fact any chemical reaction starting from purely non-chiral molecules that could potentially lead to chiral molecules will produce the left and right handed in equal amounts, or what is known as a racemic mixture.

So how do you get to homochirality (or one-handedness) in the molecules of life? It turns out that there are physical mechanisms that can convert a racemic mixture into one that has "more of one-handedness than the other". One way to do this is by a process called Viedma ripening that makes use of interconverting molecules between the solid and solution phases. (When you are dissolving a salt in water, you are converting the chemical species from the solid phase into the solution phase.) I'm not going to describe the process here but suffice to say that the authors of the paper combined a chemical reaction involving non-chiral reactants that produced a chiral molecule (in a racemic mixture) and then combined this with Viedma ripening to achieve "homochirality" where the solid phase had just one of the chiral molecules but not the other.

This is still a long way from solving the puzzle of the origin of homochirality in life, but it is a clever idea that made use of a process first "discovered" in physics and combined it with chemistry. "Interdisciplinary" is now the buzzword in research. But how do we learn about what is going on in other areas? This is why as a scientist I try to read more broadly and not confine myself to my very specific subfield. Reading the Nature Communications article this week illustrated in a small way what I do as a scientist. As I was reading the article I was chasing down some of the references in it to catch up on the latest known about Viedma ripening. I skimmed through several other articles (in both physics and chemistry journals) and learned not just details about the mechanics of the process, but about some mathematical modeling and computer simulations that could pertain to my own research. The specific chemical reaction used (a Mannich reaction) gave me an idea in one of my own research projects that I should try out. Therefore I did a little more reading surrounding the topic and sketched something I will try out (or give to one of my students as a project). So fifteen minutes of reading a specific article turned out into three hours of research where I learned a number of useful things and came up with a new research idea. That's how the rabbit hole of research goes!

Experiential Learning and Pondering the Nature of a Boggart

In Book 3, although Defense Against the Dark Arts is not a new class per se, the new teacher Professor Lupin starts out by teaching the class what to do when encountering a boggart. He uses what I would call guided experiential learning. First he starts out with a short description about the boggart peppered with some Q&A for those who have done the pre-reading. (Hermione always does the pre-reading. It’s unclear if anyone else does.) Then he walks them through how to prepare themselves, in particular by having Neville help him with the first example. This is a needed confidence booster for poor Neville who has long suffered the taunts of Professor Snape! Professor Lupin also steps in to prevent potential chaos from taking place when he anticipates that the boggart might change into Lord Voldemort if it turned its attention to Harry. The class is clear, well-organized, connects theory to practice, and best of all it gets everyone up and moving around to actually “do” Defense Against the Dark Arts. If only we had more teachers like Professor Lupin.

In earlier literature, the boggart was usually a denizen of a bog or a marsh (like the hinkypunk in the books). However, in the Harry Potter world, a boggart is a shape-shifter that hides in small dark spaces. The most interesting thing about the boggart is what it does when it encounters a person. The boggart somehow recognizes the deepest fear of this person and shape-shifts appropriately. How does the boggart do this? It’s like mind-reading of a sort except that you might not even be thinking of your deepest fear at the moment, hence making this power more subtle and more powerful (and also more uncanny). The dementor’s power seems closely related – it can extract memories from its prey (that are not necessarily being thought about just prior to an encounter), and then projecting it into the person’s consciousness.

Let’s think about shape-shifting for a moment. From a material point of view, one needs to do several things: (a) move the atoms around so as to form an object of a different shape, (b) add or remove atoms as needed from the surrounding environment to match the composition and size of the new object, and (c) do this all very, very quickly. There isn’t necessary an inherent difficulty with (a) and (b). The troublesome part is the time factor because it would require a large overall burst of energy – actually many very specific, small bursts of energy to reconfigure the atoms in exactly the right way. If magic is akin to manipulating electromagnetic radiation, then this could all work. How such specific manipulation takes place is still an open question. The shape-shifting activity of the boggart has many complements in the magical world. Professor McGonagall teaches her students how to Transfigure one object into another. Animagi can change their own shape. Objects can be “conjured” out of thin air, for example when Dumbledore causes sleeping bags to appear while the staff search Hogwarts for Sirius Black in Book 3. One might even argue that the creation of matter can take place in the appropriate energy field given Einstein’s famous E = mc².

Perhaps a better way to think about the boggart is as the projection of a nightmare into viewable physical space. It’s unclear that the boggart actually actively physical harms its prey, and instead the harm is self-inflicted by the viewer that the boggart is “attacking”. The boggart, fittingly, is defeated essentially by disbelief (by considering it to be ridiculous or riddikulus), and when destroyed it explodes “into a tiny wisps of smoke and [is] gone”. It’s also unclear if the boggart actually takes on the physicality of the nightmare. Perhaps the boggart’s display is related to a holographic 3D-projection. There are several ways one can achieve a similar effect with modern technology. Of course the hard part is how the boggart accesses the nightmare of its prey in the first place, let alone convert it into the appropriate bits of information for a hologram.

That’s a lot to ponder. I’d like to end the post by commenting on Professor Lupin’s end of year “exam” in Defense Against the Dark Arts. He sets up an obstacle course with the creatures the students have learned to encounter throughout the year. This reinforces what they have learned, but it is also very practical. Experiential learning again, in the context of an exam! The closest thing we have in our chemistry curriculum is a “Practical” exam in our lab courses. I do wish that we could better integrate the lab portions of our introductory level chemistry labs with what the students are learning in the lecture. We do make the effort to have many cross-points, but it’s still challenging because of the material that needs to be covered in lecture and the techniques that need to be covered in lab. In our more advanced courses, the integration is much stronger (and in a sense easier as the students have learned the basic lab techniques) and one can now design creative lab sessions. In any case, I’m glad to be reminded of good teaching and learning experiences!

Of Tea Leaves and Time Turners

Book 3 is my favorite in the Harry Potter series, so I was excited to re-read it this weekend. One thing that jumped out at me in the early part of the book is the trepidation and excitement of new classes. It’s been a while since I have taken a new class as a student, however over the years I’ve had the opportunity to teach new classes or revamp old ones in very different ways that the class feels new. At this point I have now taught 12-15 different courses or “preps” as a college professor and I’m looking forward to more!

The first new class Harry takes in his third year is Divination. Interestingly Professor Trelawney starts her class in the same way that Snape started his Potions class, i.e., with an admonishment. “So you have chosen to study Divination, the most difficult of all magical arts. I must warn you at the outset that if you do not have the Sight, there is very little I will be able to teach you.” This sounds like one of those dreaded weed-out classes common in the sciences, and my field of chemistry might be the guiltiest of the lot. Some years I have actually started my Quantum Physical Chemistry course by telling the students that this would probably be the hardest class they would take as a Chemistry or Biochemistry major. However I hasten to add that as they persevere through the course, they will discover and learn things at the heart of chemistry that will excite them. I also encourage them to come prepared for class and to visit my office early and often to get help on the (dreaded) problem sets.

Having pondered the subject of memory in Book 2, it is interesting to consider Divination, in terms of reading the future, as the opposite of memory. Why is it we remember things past but the future seems veiled? Why is the Arrow of Time unidirectional? There is an argument that makes use of probability, entropy and equilibrium in closed systems but that somehow feels unsatisfactory when pondering the deep mysteries of time. Now in the case of Trelawney and perhaps many a modern day seer who claims to read the future, common sense guesswork and broad strokes may be all that is needed. Human beings are narrators. We are particularly good at building and weaving stories to make sense of the events in our lives. A broad reading of the tea leaves or fortune cookies provides lots of room to play with when constructing a narrative. Maybe in a future post I will analyze more closely each of Trelawney’s pronouncements.

Of course one could accurately predict the future if one has already experienced it. The crux of the Prisoner of Azkaban narrative is the use of the Time Turner allowing Harry and Hermione to “know what will happen”, albeit at a different vantage point and with some amount of confusion on Harry’s part. Time travel, time loops, time paradoxes – these are all staples of sci-fi and have featured in many recent blockbuster movies (Interstellar, Edge of Tomorrow, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Men in Black 3, Looper, to name a few). As a part-time quantum mechanic, I have enjoyed reading, thinking, and speculating over the physics and metaphysics of the matter (or matter for that matter – pun intended).

However, let me ask a different question instead. Would you really want to know your personal future? When I was younger, I certainly did. But now I’m not so sure, and I think living life fully (one might say magically) is to experience it in the moment. It might be much blander and less interesting to go through life knowing what was going to happen especially if you had no power to change it. Not to mention, if the ending is “bad”, there is no hope. (It’s unclear if good and bad would exist the same way in a completely predictable choiceless life.) But even if time travel is possible, could you change your past or future? What would the limitations be?

Let’s ignore the brain-burning paradoxes for a moment and speculate on something simpler. If you had a time turner what would you use it for? Save the world? Or figure out ahead what will be on the next chemistry test?

A funny graphic I found browsing the web some time ago says it all.

P.S. Surprising tidbit I noticed in Book 3: In Potions class, when the shrinking solution is tested on Trevor (Neville's toad), he is turned into a tadpole. Trevor went back in time so to speak, instead of just getting physically smaller. Seems like a theme to me.

Doubt, Inquiry and a Liberal Arts Education

When I first started my career as a professor in a liberal arts college, I spent most of my time thinking about chemistry classes, my chemistry research, and my role within the chemistry department. Over time however, I have become increasingly interested and concerned with what goes on in other departments, what type of overall education our students are receiving (beyond my department), and whether the liberal arts education that we offer is cohesive or coherent.

As part of educating myself, I have started reading and thinking (and discussing with my colleagues) the nature of a liberal arts education, and the role that the sciences play within this framework. This past week I finished Michael Roth’s Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters (Yale University Press, 2014). Roth takes the reader through the ideas and history of liberal education in the U.S., but much of what he discusses is strongly relevant in the discussions surrounding the direction of higher education in the twenty-first century.

In the final chapter of the book, Roth devotes a chunk of time to discussing the ideas of Dewey. Roth writes (p168): “Learning in the context of living means modifying one’s behavior on the basis of experience; it means trying things out and revising one’s attempts through collaboration. It’s not that one gets and education in order to do things in the world; it’s that doing things in the world and getting an education are part of the same process. One is not prior to the other.” This sounds very much like what many of us would like to do in the sciences by having scientific inquiry as part of the core curriculum that all students should experience. Furthermore, our major courses should reflect a research-rich curriculum. These, along with Living Learning Communities are buzzwords in higher education at the moment.

Roth goes on to say (pp168-169): “Conformity is the enemy of learning because in order to conform you restrict your capacity for experience; you constrict your plasticity. Doubt is the antidote to conformity because doubt about the way things are (or are said to be) encourages inquiry… With learning, there is always risk, and educators harness the energy of that risk for creative purposes.” This certainly encourages to be a bit more risk-taking in my teaching as I’m hoping to attempt in one of my classes next semester. I’ve also challenged the students to join me in the risk-taking attempt.

Doubt, however, is not something one typical associates with science courses. Having taught an interdisciplinary scientific inquiry course composed of first year students, only some of whom are considering being science majors, the idea of scientific doubt is very foreign to the students. It took a while to get them to be less worried about “what is the right answer” and move to “how does a scientist inquire?” The idea of uncertainty, which they have no problem grasping in thinking about life issues, seems to them antithetical when discussing “the facts” of science.

One approach I have used is to raise the “doubt” questions in the historical context of the scientific issue at hand to exemplify how inquiry works in different scenarios, with the hope that as students mull over current scientific problems, they will make use of the inquiry skills they have learned. Another approach is to pose a puzzle (students often enjoy these as long as they are pitched at the appropriate level, not too obviously easy or excruciatingly difficult) that requires them to work together towards a solution by probing the puzzle through inquiry. Do I successfully “harness the energy for creative purposes?” Not always, but I keep trying and incrementally improving my approach. Now that’s a skill I would like my students to learn!

The Chamber of Secrets: Where Memories Lie

As part of starting this blog, I thought it would be fun to re-read the Harry Potter series. I was able to find another three-hour block to immerse myself in the Chamber of Secrets. Because I have been thinking about the brain recently, I found it uncanny that the subject of memory is prominent in Book 2. One might even speculate that the phrase “chamber of secrets” can be applied to the brain (the chamber) and memories (the secret contents).

Memories are strange things. We don’t quite know where they reside or how they are stored or indexed, although neuroscientists are working hard at trying to understand all of this. False memories can be planted, and it is almost certain that what we might think of as “true” memories are easily changed and embellished over time unless we had a way of keeping the “original” ones intact. Events that one experiences can certainly be recorded and stored by strapping a video recorder to one’s head or wearing a Google Glass. But prior to these recent inventions and having cheap digital data storage, our memory of events experienced can be quite fleeting.

Tom Riddle preserves a memory of his sixteen-year-old self in an enchanted diary. I was struck by the similarity to Harry’s experience with the diary to a later experience with the Pensieve. Although if this was indeed Riddle’s memory, it seems inconsistent that Harry lands in the Headmaster’s Office prior to Tom’s arrival, and in fact behind closed doors. Maybe it’s an inconsistency in this earlier book prior to the Pensieve being introduced and the explanation of how it worked. However, maybe in this case, the diary is different and not just a container of memories, but certainly an independent actor in its own right.

However before Harry learns about the diary, he and all of Hogwarts is introduced to the very annoying Gilderoy Lockhart. What is Lockhart’s specialty? Memory charms! He tracks down magical folks who have carried out daring deeds, modifies their memories, and then claims those great deeds for himself. For some reason this time around, reading Book 2 got me thinking about how memory erasures work. I also recently re-watched Men in Black 3, where the equivalent approach is to use the neuralyzer on Earthlings (akin to Muggles) who have witnessed alien activity. I haven’t done the research to know if electro-stimulation methods have been used in psychiatric patients to erase memories in real life. It certainly has been used for other reasons. (Oddly enough I also watched the new version of Total Recall recently on DVD.)

To modify or in this case erase a recent memory, the spell Obliviate is cast with the aid of a wand in the Harry Potter world. I imagine that the spellcaster points his or her wand at the forehead of the “victim” while carrying this out. (Perhaps this residual image comes from the movies.) In the Men in Black world, the neuralyzer flashes a blue light at the onlookers while the men in black are protected if they wear appropriate (and presumably special) eye-protection.

Now if one thinks of brain storage and activity as a series of electrical signals, then one could disrupt those signals with electromagnetic (EM) radiation. The EM pulse strategy is a staple of science fiction plots to disable electrical activity. (Now as a chemist, I would say there is plenty of chemical signaling in the brain, but presumably this can also be disrupted by EM radiation.) The EM pulse idea (with its bluish glow) can be plausibly attributed as the mechanism of the neuralyzer in the where the radiation “enters” through the eyes (which just witnessed the event) and disrupts the forming of the memory in the brain. The Obliviate spell might do the same although the books do not make it clear where the entry point is if one is needed. Is that how spells work over distance? We can’t see the mechanism with the naked eye but maybe spells manipulate that which cannot be seen – electromagnetic waves, which then go on to manipulate other material objects. In the case of memory modification the objects could be the “physical” memory storage devices (I would say “chemical”). But maybe all spellcasting has a similar basis in the way matter is manipulated via EM waves, and that this becomes most obvious in battle spells with their flashes of red and green jets of light as depicted in the movies.

So much to speculate on, so little time! I will probably have to work on a multi-part feature on magic and science, oh, somewhere in the near future.

C2O

I was in the grocery store when the following caught my eye.

Instead of thinking "Oh, that's clever and catchy. Instead of H2O, they call their coconut water product C2O", I automatically thought to myself: "Is C2O a stable molecule?"

When I teach Lewis structures in class, we use examples to build up four general rules of thumb to draw good structures.
1. Octet! (Especially C, N, O, F)
2. Small formal charges (+1 and -1 are okay)
3. If there are formal charges, negative goes on the more electronegative element
4. Resonance helps!
(In class, we actually go through the reason why these general rules work. I'll skip this so you won't feel like you're in chemistry class. The horror!)

So three seconds later, I have thought of the following structure for C2O.

The problem is that there is the carbon on the left does not have an octet. The structure is somewhat analogous to the interesting resonance structures of carbon monoxide (that we discuss in class). Yes, I think about this about ten seconds after.

Both the structures shown are important because even though both atoms follow the octet rule in the structure on the right, the formal charges do not follow element electronegativity. The whole formalism for Lewis structures is interesting because we attempt to statically represent the dynamical electrons to give ourselves some conceptual understanding of what the electrons are on average doing in the molecule. We cannot actually pinpoint the location of any electron to perfection thanks to the real Heisenberg (not W.W. for the Breaking Bad fans). The structure on the left sort of looks like the C2O structure except you cannot use the same "moving electrons around trick" to get octets around each atom.

Then I thought that one way that C2O could be come stable is by dimerizing to form (C2O)2. I've now used up probably about a minute of grey matter.

The octet rule is now satisfied. I don't even know if this molecule actually exists or if anyone has made it.

One that I do know exists is C2O2.

Now wouldn't this be better as a formula for COCO-nut water and make better advertising? I've now probably "wasted" 3 minutes total thinking up all of this while still at the grocery store.

Well, no. Because ethenedione is not good for you, nor is it an ingredient in coconut water. (Thank goodness!) What is in coconut water? Companies advertise this as an electrolyte replenisher so it's really just salt water with some sweetness so you don't spew it out of your mouth when attempting to drink it. And the whole point of C2O is its analogy to H2O in an esthetic and non-chemical sense.

What did I learn from this? That my brain automatically thinks about chemistry given half a chance in most any situation. The first time I read the word "unionized" in the popular press, I read it as un-ion-ized, i.e., a chemical species that remains neutral rather than turning into an ion (an electrically charged species). I was all confused for a bit before figuring out my error. However, every time I see the word, I still automatically read it as a chemist for a split second before I quickly realize that context matters. An even worse example was when the word "staycation" showed up on a headline and I actually pronounced it "stay-cat-I-on" and couldn't figure out what it was and someone else had to explain it to me (after a lot of laughing). Maybe no one else but a chemist will find it as funny.

And thus concludes my possibly useless chemistry lesson for the day, which I have found amusing as I muse upon it. Three minutes of thought. An order of magnitude longer to write down the thoughts and preserve them for posterity. Is this what blogging is about?

Quiz for non-chemists: There should be enough information in this article for you to draw a good Lewis structure for CO2. (Now that's a worthy molecule for a great many posts in the future...)