Strange Arrival, The Demiguise

If you hadn’t already guessed from the semi-cryptic title, this post is about the three most recent movies I watched in the cinema (as opposed to borrowing the DVD from the library): Doctor Strange, Arrival, and Fantastic Beasts. Hence today’s post will ruminate on Magic, Time and Magic+Time respectively. Let’s start with Magic.

Doctor Strange touches on the relationship between magic and science, as the main protagonist, a man of science who does not believe in magic, is forced to confront the possibility that there are magical ways of manipulating matter and energy. Interestingly, the channeling of such magic requires an object – like a wand in the Harry Potter series, except in this case it is a ring. The multiverse allows characters to access different dimensions, but what I think is more interesting is that the idea provides other sources of accessible energy. It’s hard enough to draw “quality” energy from one’s immediate earthly surroundings thanks to the second law of thermodynamics. Having parallel universes located in other dimensions, but in the same “local space” provides an immediate source for the magician who can access them.

Both light and dark magic are present in Doctor Strange, similar to the Harry Potter series. Equating magic with energy for a moment, this means the magician can draw either from light energy (photons of some sort) and dark energy. The physicists tell us that there is both light and dark energy in our universe, so presumably a similar situation exists in parallel universes. Of course, physicists don’t actually know what dark energy is, nor how to channel/manipulate the energy as they can photons. Dark energy is a source for prolonging life in the movie. In the Harry Potter series, Voldemort, he who flees death, does something similar by using dark magic to create his Horcruxes.

The visuals in Doctor Strange use light to represent certain types of magic – the creation of portals, shields, weapons. These “objects” do not look as physical but are rather outlined in pixels of light. Are these created only by “light” energy? Interestingly, in some scenes, when the bad guys create some of their sharp weapons, they do not have the same bright light but rather materialize in a ghostly, cold, hue – possibly resembling “dark” energy. I’m not sure if that was the intent of the special effects team creating the visuals. The Potter series uses different colors (e.g. red/gold versus green) possibly to represent different spells associated with Gryffindors and Slytherins. It’s hard to represent magical spells visually without having some “light” associated with it even if this is less realistic from an energy manipulation point of view. If anything, you want to absorb higher quality energy (i.e. low-entropy photons) so you can disperse it in some other (high-entropy) way.

Overall Doctor Strange was mainly an action movie trying to capitalize on its visuals, but had a much weaker narrative. Arrival, on the other hand, is mainly about the story. When the main protagonist Louise Banks (played by Amy Adams) encounters the aliens, they are shrouded in a mist. The theme however has to do with consciousness and time. Thanks, perhaps to the second law again, we experience the arrow of time with a particular direction. We remember the past but cannot see the future. But what if one could experience time in a non-linear way? The difficulty is how one could be conscious of two different time windows simultaneously while still being “in the stream of time”. Arrival does this masterfully. Now that I know the premise of the movie, I need to watch it a second time. (I’m waiting for the DVD to get to the local library, maybe six months from now.)

Instead of accessing the energy from interdimensional parallel universes in the same spatial locality, Louise accesses the timestream at different points along her own timeline. Her consciousness is localized in one time stream at any given moment in the movie. It is unclear what is happening simultaneously at a different point in the timestream. But perhaps that’s the problem: simultaneity isn’t what we think it is. Time has always been a slippery concept, as recognized back in by Augustine of Hippo back in the 4^th-5^th centuries, and articulated in a marvelous chapter of his Confessions. What would it be like to be outside a timeline looking in? The best way I can think of it is after reading a story. You, the reader, knows what happens to the characters anywhere along the timeline. Could you the reader enter such a timeline? What would that even mean? Choice, free will, and all matter of conundrums twist our thoughts in knots.

Could Louise manipulate events and change her timeline? Arrival leaves this question unanswered, but many other “time-travel” movies attempt to portray some of the philosophical conundrums. In the now-classic Back to the Future, Marty McFly starts to “disappear” or dissolve as an alternative timeline unfolds that might result in his parents not getting married and him not being born. I recently finished the Continuum series, which has its own share of twists. There is a small segment involving time in Doctor Strange, when Strange traps the evil antagonist in a time loop, although the now-classic Groundhog Day probably does this theme best.

Both time and magic feature in Fantastic Beasts when the Demiguise comes into play. Not having read the book or PotterMore (where I’m guessing it may have made an appearance), watching the movie was my first encounter. It’s an interesting beast with two powers that made it hard to “catch”. It can turn invisible, and it can predict the future – although it is unclear exactly how it makes the prediction and how accurate it can be. The trick to catching the demiurge is to behave “unpredictably”. This suggests that the prediction is based on probability and patterns, rather than certainty. Maybe it is particularly adept at advanced Arithmancy in a more practical realization rather than a theoretical one.

That is similar to what we are trying to do with Big Data. Build models, feed in large data sets, extract patterns, and predict the future. Or maybe the Demiguise thinks in the same way that Louise Banks comes to think – in a somewhat non-linear fashion being able to access the timeline at different points. No mention is made about whether the Demiguise can access the past. In fact, we have no idea how the Demiguise thinks and manages its feat of reasonably good futuristic prediction – which can be foiled by being unpredictable. Is the ability to be unpredictable part of what makes us human? This begs the question: Unpredictable to whom or what? Perhaps there is an omniscient being who can predict exactly what each and every human does and will do, and not just in a probabilistic fashion. The (probabilistic) latter could conceivably be accomplished by a very large and powerful computer, laden with data that tracks our every move in a dystopian future.

Should I predict if the Demiguise will feature in a future installment of Fantastic Beasts? I have no idea how to make this prediction. I’m going to say Yes, but only as a bit part and not a central character. The pattern of future movies having to “top” earlier ones will require elaborate and interesting powers. The Demiguise could have interesting roles to play, but the point is to introduce new and even more fantastic beasts!

What Universities Can Be

What Universities Can Be is the title of Robert Sternberg’s latest book. I’ve read a fair bit from Sternberg, both books and articles, since I’m interested in the role that creativity can play in education. One annoying thing I’ve started to find is that Sternberg tends to repeat himself verbatim (is it self-plagiarism?) and cites himself a lot (perhaps to avoid such a charge). This trend is particularly evident in his latest book. To be fair, in the preface, he states that he has been thinking about the content of this book for over 40 years, and the book builds on many articles “published over the years through various outlets”.

The key proposal of the book is the establishment of an ideal university characterized by the acronym ACCEL. This stands for Active Concerned Citizenship and Ethical Leadership. In Sternberg’s words, “successful ACCEL university graduates succeed when they make the world a better place in which to live.” This goal is the first of several key characteristics of an ACCEL institution. The others are that its graduates will impress employers with their “initiative and hard work” and will “give back” to society, students would be admitted based on principles of access and potential broadly-measured (this is Sternberg’s specialty area), the students will develop said broad abilities based on Sternberg’s WICS principles, and finally scholarship is valued primarily by long term impact.

The strongest part of the book is Part II “Who Gets In and Who is Able to Go?” covering the admissions process, financial aid and college costs. Sternberg has thought very carefully about this issue, and done plenty of work in this area, both as a researcher and as a university administrator. The chapter on Admissions critically looks at each of the typical evaluation criteria, with particular detail into the uses and misuses of test scores. Since Sternberg has administrative experience, his chapter on College Costs thoughtfully considers both the factors that contribute to the rise in costs but also discusses different options to keep costs down, and why this is a very difficult and tangled problem.

On the other hand, I was less impressed with his more cursory analyses of faculty assessment, governance, and assessing student learning in later parts of the book. Perhaps I have not been an administrator long enough to appreciate his point of view, but some of the suggestions seemed simplistic. This is in contrast to his very detailed Part II described above. The chapter on Teaching and Learning had an interesting (although not completely novel) proposal of “Interdisciplinary Problem-Based Learning as an Alternative to Traditional Majors and Minors”. It’s an idea that is not easy to implement given the current structure of universities, but it is also unclear how to implement it well if you started a new ideal university. Quest University in Canada, is to some extent, built on this principle. The student’s capstone project is a Question. There are no majors or departments in the institution. There are some attractive aspects of this setup but also some significant challenges. (I’ve visited Quest and talked to faculty, students, staff and administrators so I have some idea of what goes on.)

What can universities be? Post-election here in the U.S., there have been a flurry of op-eds discussing whether universities are bastions of elitism, out-of-touch with many parts of the country. What is “higher” in higher education? Is it the key outcomes that Sternberg thinks would be acquired by a student having an ACCEL education? Is it primarily academic? Joanna Williams would argue that the many popular outcomes advertised by institutions of higher learning are a distraction from their key academic purpose. Her new book, Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity, argues that “academic freedom [is] increasingly criticized as an outdated and elitist concept… and called into question by a number of political and intellectual trends such as … [among other things] identity politics.” (I’ve read this book, but I think her previous book was stronger. She builds on her earlier work, but the newer book thankfully doesn’t smack of self-plagiarism.)

Is higher education something that everyone should experience? Unlike the U.S., access to tertiary education is much more limited in many countries around the world. Institutions with a liberal arts curriculum emphasize critical thinking, ethical judgment, adept adapting, and other “high”-sounding outcomes that prepare one to be the “ideal” citizen of the new democratic polis built on the foundation of Greek philosophical ideas and ideals. But shouldn’t these be for everyone? Or is it the “higher” part of education that we are maintaining, perhaps somewhat removed from the “trade” professions. In the early universities, the students had a “higher” calling indeed – a religious one. Perhaps the situation in the U.S. should not be surprising, the “higher” educated elites being one side of a polarized entity.

What should universities be? Touted as the ticket to moving up to a higher socio-economic class, it is perhaps good that universities and academics be pushed to consider what indeed is the value added of higher education. Sternberg’s focus on wisdom, creativity and ethical leadership seem like good things, although structuring them into the educational framework may prove challenging.

CO2: The Boardgame

I don’t have many boardgames that have sat on the shelf for a few years, so it was time to finally sit down and learn CO2, a game by Vital Lacerda. After all, how many good meaty games are there with a chemical formula for a name? The game isn’t about chemistry per se, but it is about climate change, fossil fuels, rising CO2 levels, and alternative energy sources.

The game supports 2-5 players, and there is a solo variation (that I haven’t tried). So far I’ve only tried it with 2 and 4 players and it seems to scale well. Each player leads a multinational energy company that is “responding to government requests for new, green power plants” (according to the game rules introduction). There is a cooperative aspect to the game, in the sense that if the CO2 level rises past 500 ppm, everybody loses. If global catastrophe isn’t triggered however, then players gain victory points through various mechanisms. Building green power plants, being a leader in scientific knowledge in alternative energies, making money (yes, that is part of the game), and satisfying corporate goals and U.N. goals – all these contribute to one’s score. The winner, as in most games, has the highest score.

The board is visually pleasing. (Excuse my poor photography; my hands shake.) Especially when a game is in full swing. The six continents and their power plants are just within the outer circle. There is a mix of fossil fuel plants that contribute to increasing CO2 levels and green power plants built by the players. Construction of a power plant takes place in three stages. First a project is proposed, then infrastructure for the project is installed, and finally the plant is constructed. Any company can propose, install or construct – but ownership doesn’t take place until the construction. The center of the board shows the Carbon Emissions Permit (CEP) market, and just surrounding it are summits that scientists can attend and also markers that indicate the types of alternative fuels each continent will accept.

In the picture above you can see that Asia is full of fossil fuel plants (two oil and one gas). The black marker below indicates that CO2 is currently at 430 ppm. There is one proposed project for forestation (the most expensive of five alternative technologies). Towards the left of Asia is Oceania. It has one recycling (the least expensive) power plant built alongside fossil fuel producers. The blue player owns the power plant and also has a scientist research biomass in a proposed project. One needs to have enough scientific knowledge before construction of a power plant can take place, and one also needs money and technology to build the plants. Proposing projects provides resources in the form of grants. Installing projects costs a CEP but then provides some benefits. The way CEPs move throughout the game is one of the most interesting aspects of the game. I did not grasp it when I first read the rules and it takes actually playing the game to see how it works.

Above is North America with a number of alternative power plants: biomass, cold fusion and solar owned by three different players. The orange player with the highest level plant also “controls” the region and therefore can use its CEPs. Each player starts the game with five single-use lobby cards, which they can use to reduce costs or provide resources. Each player also has a specific company goal that could award additional victory points at the end of the game if the goals are achieved. These cards form the only hidden information in the game. Below you can see where scientific progress for each player in each alternative energy is tracked. Being ahead scientifically provides income, victory points, and other benefits. It’s cool to have a game where scientists doing more research, working on projects, and attending scientific conferences or summits is an important part of the game.

CO2 takes about 2 hours to play once everyone knows the rules, and assuming the game doesn’t end prematurely through global catastrophe. (It’s not that difficult to prevent global catastrophe as long as there is some cooperation among the players.) The first game is a bit of a learning curve as some of the rules seem counter-intuitive although I can attest that they work quite well, now that I have several games under my belt. While the opening moves might feel a little scripted because you don’t have many options in the beginning, the game opens up quite a bit and allows for a range of strategies. Also there are several variables in the setup of each game, which keeps thing both interesting and different. I’m looking forward to more games of CO2. The game mechanics mesh well with the theme, and I recommend it to folks who like meaty games and think scientists and alternative green energies are cool!

That's Obvious

If you are playing a game of Balderdash, and making up the meaning of a new word, what might meandertal mean? What comes to mind in 2-3 seconds?

By combining the English word meander with the German suffix tal (that means a valley, dale or glen) I’m going to say that it’s someone who meanders around in an area or field deliberately and thoughtfully. Sort of like a laid-back academic who isn’t too worried about fame and fortune. Or someone just doing his or her own thing, guided by wide and varied interests. By that definition, I am a meanderthal. (I’m now adding the “h”.) That seemed like an obvious definition to me probably because (1) I’m an academic, (2) I recently read the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde, and (3) based on accumulated recent data, the caricature of neanderthals as slow or dim-witted is likely false.

But it might not be obvious to someone who comes at this from a different viewpoint. For example, at urbandictionary.com, meanderthals are “people who wander aimlessly and always seem to get in your way in stores and supermarkets, chatting on their cell phones and paying no attention to their surroundings”. Was this definition obvious to you? I hadn’t considered it until I did a Google search and found it as the top hit. How sad. I like my definition much better, but it hasn’t yet become mainstream. (Feel free to promote my definition!)

I’ve been thinking about the “That’s Obvious” response quite a bit as I meander through the higher education literature, primarily when reading results trying to measure if some particular pedagogy is effective or not. Then I stumbled across the article by George Yates in Educational Psychology. The citation and abstract is shown below, for those interested in reading the article in full.

Here’s the opening paragraph to whet your appetite: ‘ “These research findings are just obvious,” glares the critic. On the receiving end of such criticism, the seminar presenter feels a mixture of anguish and momentary worthlessness. Can it be the case that educational researchers, especially those whose base draws upon the discipline of scientific psychology, spend years striving to advance propositions already known to all thinking people? Were such notions known already to the intelligent person in the street even at the time our great-grandparents were alive? If what we do is validate truisms, then are we not wasting our energies? Houston (1983) stated this cogently: “A great many of psychology’s principles are self-evident. One gets the uneasy feeling that we have been dealing with the obvious but did not know it” (p. 208).’

Yates draws examples from evaluating effectiveness of teachers and evaluating if learning is taking place. As teachers we should greatly care about these two things. Am I as a teacher using effective practices in my classes, both in the classroom and through outside-of-class assignments? Are my students learning effectively and how do I know? Having taught for many years, I have to a large extent forgotten what it felt like to be a novice teacher. I’m sure I was often confused as to whether I was being an effective teacher or if my students were actually learning anything. Even now, I might be still confused, but I don’t feel that way. In fact, I feel quite confident that I apply a repertoire of teaching techniques honed over the years for effectiveness in both teaching and learning. But is that really true? Am I being partially blinded by my own specific context? Do my strategies actually generalize to other contexts?

When I sit in a classroom as an observer watching one of my colleagues teaching, it is interesting to reflect on what I notice. For better or for worse, I am likely projecting what I think effective teaching looks like from my context and experience on to the person I’m observing. Thus, when I give post-visit feedback, I find myself suggesting things “I would have done” at those time-points during the class. “Here’s how I would explain it that might be more effective”, I might say. Or “by posing the question this way here’s how one could increase student participatory learning.” Since I don’t know what’s going on in the parallel universe where my colleague does what I suggested, and I don’t know the students in that class as well as my colleague, my suggestions may or may not be all that helpful or useful. My colleagues should wisely ignore some of my suggestions, although others might prove helpful to them. If all this was simply in the context of formative assessment of a colleague’s teaching, then fine and good. But if my visit is part of a formal evaluation, then I as the observer should be very careful in what I think demonstrates effective teaching. A single observation could be misleading, much like a single data point.

When I listen to a seminar or read an article about teaching, pedagogy, curriculum matters, or higher education in general, I sometimes have the “That’s Obvious” response. I’m sure in some cases this is warranted, especially if I do know the data supporting the argument in detail, but in other cases perhaps not. But that doesn’t shake the “that’s obvious” feeling. Yates suggests several reasons why this is so. First is the false consensus effect, “the belief that others construe the world in more or less the same way as oneself.” Another is ego defense where the psyche fits the data to “[confirm] the self’s command of knowledge, wisdom, and intelligence, and [establish] how facile it was of another person or agency, using the cover of research, to try to upset the self’s worldview.” It’s essentially a threat-reducing response. Yates also suggests that prior knowledge leads to a projection process that has cognitive liabilities, because of its relation to the fast activation of System 1 in formulating an adaptive response.

Yates argues that the compilation of “best practices traits” from teacher effectiveness research studies are not as obvious as one might think. (Read the article if you’re interested.) However, he then goes on to tackle a second issue that I want to briefly discuss: “The misconception that knowledge discovered is superior to knowledge transmitted.” The current popular pedagogy in STEM surrounds the idea of “inquiry-based” learning. This is a loaded phrase because it conjures up different particular and specific pedagogical practices depending on who speaks it or listens to it. (The listener and speaker may actually have different, although possibly overlapping, notions of what the phrase means to them individually.) The roots of inquiry-based approaches are rooted in constructivism. I personally think there are many good ideas and suggestions that have come from practitioners of “inquiry-based” learning (in the broadest sense of the phrase) and I myself utilize such methods to some extent.

However, it is problematic when the apostles of inquiry learning oversell the constructivist philosophy, often using it to denigrate what I will call “direct instruction”. Yates describes his painful cringing sitting in a seminar and being told that “cognitive psychology”, his subfield and specialty, supports the notion that “discovered knowledge is more meaningful than knowledge transmitted by a teacher” and the teacher can only be a knowledge “facilitator” but not a “transmission source”. Yates argues that this idea “is flawed, since it invokes false dichotomies and confuses motivational goals with instructional methodology. Put simply, the goal of direct instruction is to promote understanding, and there is no conflict between constructing knowledge and listening to a superb teacher explain complex processes.”

One thing I have learned over the years as I have delved into the science of learning literature, is that a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing. I was quite enamored of a constructivist approach on my journey as an educator. But as I delved more into the primary literature, I started to cast a critical eye on the parameters of each study and the conclusions drawn. I have now a concomitant healthy skepticism towards the notion that inquiry-based learning is superior to direct instruction at the introductory level in the sciences. I don’t think direct instruction is superior to an inquiry-based method either. I think what you use depends on the context. It will depend on who your students are, what background knowledge or experiences they have, the subject matter, the particular topic you’re teaching that day or week, what level you’re aiming at, and more. Use what is best for the particular learning goal you are trying to get across during that particular class meeting. My official written teaching philosophy sounds constructivist, but it is tempered by the practice of what I think works best for student learning in a varying learning context. Sometimes, it is not so obvious what the best approach might be. But this is what makes teaching both delightful and challenging.

P.S. As I wrote this, I have started to peruse the most recent PISA results. They actually indicate a negative correlation between student performance on the science questions and what would be broadly construed as inquiry-based methods. It is worthwhile looking at the sample questions and the actual report data.

Magical Potions and How to Design Them

If you want to bring course material to life, it’s difficult for a chemist to compete with a biologist. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them could well be the title of a course at Hogwarts taught by Newt Scamander (a Hufflepuff!). Not only could students use his tome as a textbook, they could enter his magical menagerie through his suitcase. It’s unfortunate that Care of Magical Creatures isn’t as well taught when Harry Potter and friends are in school. (No offense to Hagrid who is knowledgeable but quite the novice at teaching).

I watched Fantastic Beasts this weekend. The story and visuals are entertaining, and Eddie Redmayne does a superb job at portraying the young Scamander. He loves his magical creatures and fantastic beasts, and takes great pains to care for them to the best of his ability. It is interesting to watch a Wizarding World movie that did not come from the narrative of a book (although very loosely based off a book without said narrative). The story is tight and well-written for the pace of a two-hour “action” movie that shows off its seamlessly integrated CGI. The beasts are very interesting, and I wish I knew a bit more about them. (I suppose that’s what the book is for!) Watching the niffler in action illustrates how much havoc a loose one would cause in Hogwarts. The weakest parts of the movie were the allusions trying to connect Grindelwald into the story (they felt a little forced). In contrast, the theory of the Obscura, an elaboration from an issue that comes up also in Book 7, was quite interesting.

If Potions students weren’t so afraid of Snape and his dastardly reputation, he might have actually taught an intriguing class. In Book 1, his first-day of class introduction to the topic is well done (in my opinion), and so is Slughorn’s in Book 6. These experienced teachers know how to introduce their subject matter! Unfortunately Snape and Slughorn have serious character flaws; like us Muggle (or No-Maj) teachers, they are only too human. If I was Potions master, perhaps the best tagline I could come up with for my class would be Magical Potions and How to Design Them. I might even author this book someday, although it’s doubtful that Hufflepuff Hippo could ever compete with Scamander’s popularity.

All this made me think about my non-majors chemistry class next semester. Officially it is called Chemistry and Society, a rather generic name. I was originally going to subtitle it Potions for Muggles, but I now rather like the sound of Magical Potions and How to Design Them. We’ll cover plenty of standard chemistry – molecules, chemical bonds, and different types of chemical reactions. Intermolecular forces will be utilized to discuss drug design, i.e., I will have to move my organic chemistry subunit much earlier in the semester so we can discuss some rudimentary biochemistry and the “molecules of life”. I might have to truncate my earlier idea of starting the class with the interaction of light, energy and matter that would form a basis of magic. I think I will still ask the students to recommend potions they would like to make (if they could), and have the class final projects be the design of the proposed potions. If I get the list earlier in the semester, I can scaffold the projects by sprinkling the course material and discussions around the proposed potions.

Watching the movie also made me think about cryptozoology, the study of fantastic beasts. The Loch Ness and the Yeti are two familiar examples that hold much fascination for many. Could unicorns exist? Were there dragons? Folks in the ancient world were just as intrigued by fantastic beasts. What else is there in the depths of the ocean that we have not yet encountered? The invention of the microscope brought the microbia to our attention – hidden in plain sight, but too small for us to see with the naked eye. And it was shocking to the scientists who first discovered that we all contain multitudes!

Anton van Leeuwenhoek, inventor of the best microscopes of his day, was very secretive about how his lenses were designed. There was an element of “hiddenness” to his newfound knowledge and access to the microscopic world. Likewise, the alchemists of old, trying to make the philosopher’s stone, guarded their secrets closely. I could call them cryptochemists, perhaps. Since my Chemistry and Society course also serves as an introduction to the “scientific method”, I have tried to include examples where we try to distinguish science from pseudoscience. This seems like a good opportunity to incorporate the two historical vignettes surrounding “hiddenness” and discuss the interaction between science and magic both in the past, but also today – where extravagant claims of extrasensory perception and other types of ‘magic’ continue to enchant many twenty-first century folks.

Okay, I now have a course subtitle and a general course plan. Now I just need to flesh out the details. But first, I should concentrate on ending this semester well!

We All Contain Multitudes

I just finished reading another book that might go on my purchase list, I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong. The author, a distinguished science-writer, does a magnificent job immersing the reader in the strange and wonderful world of microbes. This book is even better than Gut, an engaging exploration of the tiny and amazing creatures in our gut. Yong does cover the fascinating world of gut microbes, but his book is larger in scope. The vignettes alternate between sweeping vistas and carefully chosen tales of particular actors – Wolbachia makes its appearance in many places.

While microbes are fascinating in themselves, their interaction with larger creatures including mammals such as ourselves is even more interesting! I learned about the razor edge in which our co-evolutionary symbiosis with microbes could well turn into dysbiosis (a new word I learned!) as nature unfolds in ways that cannot be easily predicted. What makes it hard to predict is that we, by this I mean ‘we’ in multitude, form a complex ecosystem sitting in another larger and yet more complex ecosystem. Like maroshka dolls. And yes, there are bacteria within other bacteria. Yong discusses some interesting examples where tiny creatures that have occupied a niche within another organism over evolutionary time have interesting genomes – many of them stripped down to the bare essentials.

Insects are prominent examples in Yong’s book. That’s because some of the wildest and most bizarre relationships between microbes and larger organisms come from the world of insects. I learned that after a “beewolf digs her burrow, and before she adds an egg, she presses her antennae against the soil and squeezes a white paste out of them, like toothpaste from a tube. She then shakes her head from side to side to daub this secretion against the burrow’s ceiling. The paste is an exit sign: it tells the young beewolf where to start digging when it is ready to leave the burrow.” But what is more interesting is that the paste was full of antibiotic-producing bacteria. Without this, the young wasps all died from fungal infections. The tsetse fly, known for causing sleeping sickness, provides microbes to offspring still in the body of its parent. Yong describes it as “an insect that’s trying very hard to be a mammal. Rather than laying eggs, it gives birth to live young. And rather than hedging its bets with a horde of offspring, it devotes its energies to a single grub, which it raises inside a uterus and feeds with a milk-like fluid [full of microbes].”

Many other strange creatures are described, for example, the hydra that easily regenerates its lost limbs and can even survive being turned inside out. These tiny and seemingly simple creatures, come with their own microbiomes – protectors from infections of all kinds that would otherwise torment a creature that essentially consists of only a thin layer of epithelial cells. The aphid survives on tree sap. How does it get the other half of the required amino acids? Turns out that microbes help build what it is needed, in cooperation with its host. The weird giant tube worms found at scaldingly hot (well over 200 degrees Celcius) acidic hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor – you’d think no life would even survive there – thrive in droves even though they have no mouth or gut. Turns out there are loads of bacteria that help with chemosynthesis, drawing energy from sulfur-containing compounds.

One thing that struck me is the speed at which evolution can shape microbe populations. We large lumbering beasts change much more slowly; we might be adapting poorly to an environment that is changing so much more quickly than we can handle. If not for quick-adapting microbes, we might have much more trouble with food digestion, our immune-defense mechanism, and more. The fact that we all contain multitudes that co-evolve, for better or for worse, may be one of our most important discoveries and also one with the greatest potential for advancing human health. Yong provides a number of fascinating examples at the cutting edge of synthetic biology, detailing both their promise and the inherent difficulties of such approaches. “[The] microbiome [involves] large, changing networks of connected, interacting parts. To control a microbiome is to sculpt an entire world – which is as hard as it sounds… This is why attempts at world-shaping have so far led to a few magnificent successes, but also many puzzling setbacks.”

Reading this book momentarily made me consider switching fields and becoming a biologist. There was even a vignette on Oxalobacter, the bacterium that eats oxalate and therefore could potentially reduce the most common type of kidney stone, calcium oxalate. Then again, that’s also chemistry! (And I managed to incorporate calcium oxalate and calcium carbonate as a theme into my final General Chemistry problem set for the semester! And this was before reading Yong’s example.)

Calcium White

“When it was built, the American presidential residence in Washington, DC, was coated in a damp-repellent mixture of slaked lime and glue, and people started to call it the White House. Tombs were likewise brushed with lime to protect them from the ravages of the weather.”

This is how the section on calcium compounds begins in Periodic Tales by Hugh Aldersey-Williams. (You're reading the fourth blog post on this book, here are the third, second and first.) What an interesting pair of facts – I did not realize that the reason for the white ‘paint’ had to do with the damp-repelling aspects of calcium oxide, more commonly known as lime. Actually calcium oxide works well as a desiccant because of its ability to absorb water. Apparently that is why it was used in burials, reducing the process of putrefaction and decay by absorbing moisture.

We are most familiar with a different white compound, calcium carbonate, also known as limestone. This is the white of chalk, majestically displayed in the white cliffs of Dover. (I’d like to see them with my own eyes someday.) The author makes the interesting observation that we think of writing mainly as black ink on white paper, but many centuries ago it was likely much easier to use white chalk to write on a dark surface. I first taught using chalk on a blackboard, but now use dry-erase markers on a white board. I’m not sure which is worst – chalk dust or organic fumes from the ink or solvent cleaner. That being said, the markers of today do not have the characteristic smell of its predecessors, and good quality white boards do not require frequent treatment and the solvent cleaner.

Chalk powder can be used as markers for any surface where their white contrasts with practically anything on the ground but snow. I learned that the Italian word for calcium, calcio (which spell-check annoyingly changed to ‘calico’ – good thing I noticed), is the same word for football (or soccer for U.S. folks). The author writes, “both meanings derive from the Latin calx, which is not only literal lime but also a metaphor for a goal, an achievement marked perhaps by a chalk line crossed.” Interestingly the root word also gave rise to calcination, meaning roasting in air, a word introduced by the alchemists. Calcination allows one to make lime from limestone, driving out the CO₂ from chalk (CaCO₃) to form lime (CaO). I bet you can write a balanced chemical equation for this process, now that you know the chemical formulae!

I’ve often used calcium carbonate as an example in my non-science major chemistry courses. It features prominently in the topic “Acids and Bases” because of its many applications as an acid neutralizer. I have a standard antacid demo with three flasks containing hydrochloric acid at a pH mimicking stomach acid. The flasks are mounted on stirplates, each with a magnetic stir bar. These give the aura of some exciting lab experiment – students every year think the magnetic stirrers are nifty gadgets! A drop of acid-base indicator is added to the solution. (I typically use bromothymol blue for this demo.) I get three student volunteers and each of them gets a mortar and pestle to grind up their chosen antacid. The students then get to wear safety goggles and lab gloves, and at the count of three they add their powdery substance to the flasks. Everyone watches with bated breath, but usually nothing happens. That’s because the reaction takes time (5-20 minutes depending on the starting material).

At this point I usually continue with the lesson, but the students (especially those in the front row) are keeping a close eye awaiting the colour change as the calcium carbonate neutralizes the base. In the meantime I’m describing why limestone near lakes acts as a buffer against acidification, and the process of liming a lake to prevent its pH from dropping due to acid rain and other processes. It’s also a good time to talk about the sources contributing to acid rain. We also talk about eating chalk if you were having acid reflux but your antacid was nowhere close at hand. At some point, one of the flasks will change colour before the others, leading to a flurry of excitement and cheers. It’s also a good time to discuss what an acid-base base indicator is, and why it changes colours based on pH.

In my General Chemistry course (for science majors), the decomposition of limestone into lime, while releasing carbon dioxide, is one of the early examples in “Equilibrium”. That’s because in this particular case, the equilibrium constant of the reaction is equal to the partial pressure of CO₂. It’s also a good initial system to discuss aspects of Le Chatelier’s Principle. Lime does come up when I’m discussing lattice energies, but up to this point I’ve failed to say anything interesting about it in class. Maybe I’m too focused on the principles behind lattice energies that I forget that calcium oxide is interesting in its own right.

The author pontificates: “Whiteness is freedom from colour and an escape from the rainbow chaos of life. Lime’s whiteness is a scourging simplicity, the purity of an ideal, the finality of a death. Whiting is the action of adding a layer of lime-wash, yet it is also a subtraction, a gesture towards liberation, a brushing away of the earth and the earthly, a disencumberance, a literal lightening and also the lightening of a load. The cleansing and preserving action of whitewashing ritually repeats the throwing of lime into the grave with the corpse. Our bodies decay, our bones are left, picked clean and bleached of all colour. We fade to white.”

But there is a glimmer of light: “Human intention lined in white is not always grimly fateful. Herman Melville in a chapter-long digression from the hunt for Moby-Dick meditates on how ‘whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue on its own, as in marbles, japonicas and pearls.’ Two of these three, it is no surprise to find, are calcium white. Japonica is the exception: white in nature where it is not mineral – real white horses, white bears, white elephants, the albino and the albatross – is attributable not to calcium but to the arrangement of organic matter in cells in such a way that it scatters light of all colours.”