Tales of Grimm

For the first half of 2017, I am going to inject something new into my blog series for some variation - one Guest post each month! The first essay is by one of my sisters who is halfway through the first season of Grimm. Enjoy!

Grimm Season 1 – a different interpretation of fairy tales

The TV series Grimm asks the question—what if the fairy tales we know are in fact a distillation of a larger (fantastic) reality? And what if the protagonist is more feared than loved?

Set in the Pacific Northwest, already famous as the home of vampires and werewolves, Grimm has a surprisingly light touch when it comes to both its source material as well as any expectations of ‘grimness’ or darkness in the series.

Each episode starts with a quote from a fairy tale—familiar-sounding yet oblique enough that it may take you awhile to place it, at least until confirmed by other events. The series is conceived as a police procedural—crime drama, with Portland detective Burkhardt as the titular Grimm. While there is the usual murder, partner, lieutenant, and all the trappings of a police investigation, the conceit of the series is that each murder is committed by or connected to some fantasy creature who is somehow connected to a Grimm fairy tale. The creature looks human to other people, but not to a Grimm, who can “see them for what they are”.

Unlike other attempts to bring fairy tales to life, like Once Upon A Time or other reimaginations or modernizations, in Grimm, fairy tale characters are archetypes or representations of whole species of creatures. It’s difficult to illustrate this without giving spoilers, but let’s say, for example, that the Big Bad Wolf is not just a particular wolf, but he represents a whole race of wolves. Or the Bluebeard story grew from a race of creatures that likes to capture women and lock them up.

The idea, then, is similar to some fairy tale scholarship, which seeks to discover the function that traditional tales played in olden societies, passing down social mores and cultural values in the form of folk tales and children’s stories. Teaching children not to take sweets from strangers (you may find yourself in a witch’s oven!), for example, or what to do when you encounter a wolf—there are theories that Red Riding Hood had something to do with young girls reaching puberty.

Each storybook character in the Grimm TV series is thus not a ‘real’ historical person or creature, in a sense, but a distillation of a type. According to this series, the original Grimm’s fairy tales is not a collection of folk tales but a bestiary. The fairy tales are true, but not in the way you imagined. Talk about Fantastic Beasts.

In this world, Burkhardt finds out he is a Grimm—“you guys have been profiling us for centuries”, says one creature. Most creatures are afraid of Grimms—“you must hunt down and kill the bad ones”, says Aunt Marie, the librarian (that was her day job). Unlike in many coming-of-age stories, Burkhardt is an adult by the time he finds out about his special ancestry. It turns out his parents didn’t die in a car crash… oops, wrong story. (Though he does find out they didn’t die in an accident, and he gets his very own ‘Ron Weasley’, a creature who serves as a sidekick and guide through this strange new world).

What the Grimm series does well, particularly in contrast to the Harry Potter books, is that it does not take genetics as destiny. Instead of the quasi-genetic determinism which is a flaw in the otherwise excellent Potter series—notice how all Slytherins are bad, or at least nasty?—Grimm demonstrates the idea that people are not bound by their genes: there are creatures who do not necessarily act according to their traits. Not all individuals from predatory species continue to hunt, in this day and age. A genius emerges from a traditional underclass. Even the titular Grimm himself—Burkhardt—is not living up to his name and killing every creature he meets, although many clearly expect him to.

This is quite admirable, I find. After only the first few episodes of Season 1, there hasn’t been just a token ‘good guy’ out of all the evil/dark creatures. There are quite often people/creatures who transcend their ancestry. The lesson is also reinforced every time a new creature meets this strange new Grimm.

Finally, the Grimm series also brings up another interesting idea, quite prevalent in the fantasy realm but not so much in the modern world—that people are not what they seem. If some of these creatures, who look like normal people to you and me, are living among us, who’s to know? How can you tell if your barista is actually a blut-bad or your lawyer a jaeger-bar? (The series, appropriately enough, likes Germanic names).

As C.S. Lewis said, “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare…” (from The Weight of Glory). 

So, as with all good fairy tales, you can read a lesson into this series. Appearances can be deceiving. Don’t take things at face value. And don’t assume you know what someone will do just based on their heritage—things may not be what they seem.

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But if you ARE in a fantasy world, do stay vigilant for those who are out to get you! There is, it turns out, a race of Reapers whose job is to go after Grimms…

P.S. If the series has one weakness, it is the lack of female leads (thus far in Season 1). Unlike other police procedurals of our time, like Bones, Mentalist, Castle, CSI, or even Criminal Minds, Portland PD seems strangely male-dominated. There are no female investigators featured, aside from the medical examiner. Even though Grimm is premised on archaic stories, it seems odd to not have a more significant female presence, in this day and age. However, girlfriend Juliet does start to play more of a role as the series goes on, and ‘Hermione’ may turn up in a later episode. So it does improve in this respect… In the meantime, the budding bromance between Burkhardt and ‘Ron’ provides the traditional banter and odd couple dynamic usually found between the male and female leads. 

Salt

After reading Paper, I decided to tackle Salt by Mark Kurlansky. Like Paper, Salt is chock full of interesting information with both breadth and depth. Appropriately, the first chapter begins in China, “A Mandate of Salt”. I learned that the earliest written record of salt production dates back to 800 B.C., but the records discuss the production and trade of salt during the Xia dynasty going back a further thousand years. I also learned the history of fermenting fish and soybeans to make what is now the ubiquitous soy sauce (although fish is no longer used in the recipe). Fermentation – it’s all chemistry! And those tasty black gelatinous century eggs? They are soaked in brine and sometimes encased in salted mud and straw

A hero in the Chinese story was the governor of what is now Sichuan province, an engineer named Li Bing. The province had long produced salt, but Li Bing figured out that the brine came from underground, and had the first brine wells drilled (in 252 B.C.) As the Chinese became more skilled at the task, the drill shafts went deeper. (Now I’ll quote two great paragraphs from Kurlansky…)

“But sometimes the people who dug the wells would inexplicably become weak, get sick, lie down and die. Occasionally, a tremendous explosion would kill an entire crew of flames spit out from the bore holes. Gradually, the salt workers and their communities realized that an evil spirit from some underworld was rising up through the holes they were digging… Once a year the governors of the respective provinces would visit these wells and make offerings.”

“By A.D. 100, the well workers, understanding that the disturbances were caused by an invisible substance, found the holes where it came out of the ground, lit them, and stated placing pots close by. They could cook with it. Soon they learned to insulate bamboo tubes with mud and brine and pipe the invisible force to boiling houses. These boiling houses were open sheds where pots of brine cooked until the water evaporated and left salt crystals.”

The passage reminded me about the kobolds of the Saxon miners, but what is particularly neat is that the workers behaved like amateur scientists and engineers. Yes, there may be evil spirits to placate, but one can make use whatever fumes may be coming from the beasts below. They essentially invented the first natural gas piping system, all in the service of salt production! Not only that, the use of bamboo piping spread to irrigation and plumbing systems. The Chinese also discovered gunpowder from mixing salt with other ingredients. And their salt taxes imposed by the government go way back, more than four millennia. The Chinese pictograph character for salt apparently “depicted the state’s control of its manufacture.” The image below is from salt.umd.edu and traces the evolution of the character.

 

As Kurlansky writes: “A substance needed by all humans for good health, even survival, would make a good tax generator. Everyone had to buy it, and so everyone would support the state through salt taxes.” The highs and lows of salt taxes are a prominent part of the book. Kurlansky trots the globe with how governments used and abused salt taxes from the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to Gandhi’s famous march in 1930 defying colonial Britain’s salt laws. He traces the important role of salt in the American Civil War, the American Revolution, and the Spanish wars with the Aztecs and the Incas. Whoever controls the salt, has the power.

History and chemistry is discussed in Chapter 18, “The Odium of Sodium”, titled after a ditty written by a British novelist.

Sir Humphry Davy

Abominated gravy.

He lived in odium

Of having discovered sodium.

In 1807, Davy isolated sodium via electrolysis. In 1810, he isolated chlorine. The former is a soft grey metal that reacts violently with water; the latter a greenish yellow gas that would gain infamy in gaseous trench warfare of the first world war. But when combined, they make sodium chloride, a white crystalline powdery substance, and the most common ingredient in what we now call table salt. The chemist thinks of salts as ionic compounds consisting of an electron donor (the metal) and an electron acceptor (the non-metal). The combinations of different metals and non-metals produces different salts with different properties. Saltpeter, a constituent of gunpowder, is potassium nitrate. Epsom salt is magnesium sulfate. Chalk is calcium carbonate. The combinations are myriad. We owe it to Davy and the many scientists who teased out the chemical theory of salts for our plethora of choices today. (Picture below from an interesting RedOrbit article about scientists studying the compression of table salt.)

Through much of history, the whiteness of salt and having uniform crystals, was highly prized. Dirtier and coarser salts were viewed as “less pure” and less valuable; perhaps related to the rise of industrial mechanization. But the tables have turned. Artisanal salt, irregular in its composition, not dazzling white because of the presence of impurities, has now become the darling of gourmet chefs and their many followers. Dirty salt, it had been called through the ages, and now it commands the higher prices.

What is our new salt today? The substance that everyone needs and can be taxed appropriately by the governments, or perhaps, the corporations of the world. The quest for the Killer App, the holy grail of the twenty-first century, is perhaps simply a short-term substitute for the position long held by salt.

Cognitive Load: Balancing Pedagogies

In my previous post, I mentioned that I’ve been thinking about how to factor in cognitive load as I design activities in my classroom. My thinking was partly motivated by having just read a monograph by A.J. Martin based on his Vernon-Wall lecture [1] in 2015. The title of his lecture: “Can educators reduce students’ cognitive load and boost motivation and engagement? Integrating explicit instruction and discovery learning through Load Reduction Instruction (LRI).”

That’s quite a mouthful. Let’s break it down.

The goal of LRI is to optimize student learning and achievement. The trick is to match the cognitive demands required with where the students are developmentally in the learning process. In the early stages, when students are novices, a more structured approach (explicit instruction) that reduces cognitive load is required. This is because the novice mainly resorts to working memory, limited in its capacity. During this period, students gain fluency and build basic content and skills into long-term memory. This frees up working memory for further learning, and that’s when guided inquiry learning approaches can be a stepping-stone to autonomous learning. (We want students to learn how to learn!)

The focus on the article isn’t on achievement (there is a summary of previous work and an extensive citation list) but instead explores the effects of LRI on motivation and engagement. There is a Motivation and Engagement Wheel that encapsulates the main concepts of the article. It resembles a color wheel, except in the article I downloaded there was no color, just shades of grey, perhaps appropriately. I’ve also included a color version I found that uses traffic light colors from a quick Google search. Both are shown below. There is a more extensively annotated version later in the article not shown here. The monograph is dense with terminology but Martin clearly explains all the different pieces. (That’s probably why it is 35 pages long!)

 

The monograph contains a number of examples and practical suggestions included that illustrate the conceptual pillars of LRI. One section that I found quite interesting was the discussion on the southeast corner of the wheel. I had vague anecdotal notions of why my students would be anxious, and how this could result in poorer performance, but no particular conceptual framework to think about the issues involved. In a section on “Anxiety, failure avoidance, and self-handicapping”, Martin outlines the sources and downstream effects. Basically, anxiety, fear of failure, and other distractions, “may act as a source of extraneous cognitive load and tap the limited capacity of working memory”. These fears may also lead to self-defeating behavior, procrastination being one among many examples. The LRI pedagogical strategy in these cases is to reduce split-attention by carefully structuring the material to reduce the load on working memory.

A significant chunk of the article is devoted to discussing how LRI integrates both explicit instruction and inquiry-based learning, two pedagogies that are often portrayed (falsely in my opinion) as being in opposition to each other. The strawman in one corner is the “traditional lecture” and in the other corner we have “completely open-ended discovery”. These two approaches are philosophically rooted in positivist and constructivist approaches respectively. There is an extensive review of this debate in a book by Tobias and Duffy [2]. It prompted me to go back and re-read an excellent article from the book authored by Paul Kirschner [3]. I highly recommend it. The abstract is shown below.

Kirschner begins by defining epistemology and pedagogy. A scientist’s epistemology might be the “scientific method” (in its various guises). On the other hand, pedagogy refers to “strategies or styles of instruction”. Importantly, pedagogies can be (a) general, (b) domain-specific, or (c) specific to a certain approach to teaching. It is this third case that has caused the most misunderstanding as different groups tout their superior pedagogies. Three-letter acronyms are common, e.g., PBL = Problem Based Learning, TBL = Team Based Learning, and there is also LRI mentioned above. Kirschner quickly gets to the matter at hand. The most relevant section of the article to scientist-educators is appropriately titled: “Practicing Science or Learning to Practice Science?”

The movement in recent years has been towards constructivist approaches. (It’s more like the swinging back and forth of a pendulum, but discovery-based learning is what’s popular at the moment.) These voices declare that “inquiry into authentic questions generated from student experiences should be the central strategy for teaching science.” Kirschner quotes others: “The ultimate goal was to provide a learning environment in which students could feel like scientists in their own classrooms. This meant that our students would need to be involved in the acquisition of their scientific knowledge – not only reading and writing about – but actually doing science.”

As a chemist, I don’t disagree that students should be exposed to a curriculum that involves lab-based hands-on exercises. These are crucial to building important manual and observational skills, and can complement what the students are learning in the “lecture” portion of the course. However, touting the “doing science is the best way to learn science” as the primary pedagogical driving force at the introductory level is what I find questionable. The most recent PISA results would seriously question this credo, although oddly enough it hasn’t drawn much attention in the mass media. Martin somewhat alludes to this in his article, but Kirschner tackles it head on. I’m going to quote his clear prose [4].

“This focus is coupled to the assumption that to teach the process of science (i.e., the pedagogy), we can best confront learners with experiences either based on or equivalent to science procedures (i.e., the epistemology). This has led to a tenacious commitment by educators, instructional designers, and educational researchers to discovery and inquiry methods of learning which is based upon confusing teaching science as inquiry (i.e. an emphasis in the curriculum on the processes of science) with teaching science by inquiry (i.e. using the process of the science to learn science). The error here is that no distinction is made between the behaviors and methods of the scientist – who is an expert practicing her or his profession – and those of a student who is essentially a novice.”

“A student, as opposed to a scientist, is still learning about the subject area in question and, therefore, possesses neither the theoretical sophistication nor the wealth of experience of the scientist. Also, the student is learning science – as opposed to doing science – and should be aided in her/his learning through the application of an effective pedagogy and good instructional design.”

“[Discovery] presupposes a prior conceptual framework and the ability to interpret and sometimes reinterpret what has been seen or experienced in abstract terms, but there is no guarantee that it will lead to new concepts, much less correct ones. This is because, first, novices have little knowledge and experience in a domain which causes them to encode information at a surface or superficial level… Second, novices do not simply produce random guesses in the absence of knowledge, but rather as systematically off the mark in a particular way that makes sense given a particular misconception. The strangest and possibly most unfortunate aspect of this whole problem is that it is not new…”

Kirschner argues that “the lack of clarity about the difference between learning and doing science has led many educators to advocate the discovery method as the way to teach science.” This fits well with current trends. Kirschner’s article was 7-8 years ago. Constructivist pedagogies have been further on the rise since. It is unfortunate that “lecture” has been getting a bad rap. There is a place for lectures amongst the different pedagogies. Experienced educators in the trenches will utilize a variety of pedagogies. You know what works, what doesn’t, and you constantly try to hone your methods with each group of students. What worked in the past may not work in the present. The problem is when administrators or governing bodies demand a particular pedagogy be used because it is deemed a “best practice”. In tertiary education, much autonomy still rests with the professor. But in primary and secondary education, the confusion between epistemology and pedagogy could result in some poor practices. As the unbundling of education continues, however, the problems may mount. We should be watchful, thoughtful and act accordingly.

[1] The Vernon-Wall lectures are part of the annual conference of the Psychology of Education Section of the British Psychological Society. The official citation for this monograph is: Martin A. J. (2016). Using Load Reduction Instruction (LRI) to boost motivation and engagement. Leicester, UK: British Psychological Society.

[2] Tobias, S. & Duffy, T. M. (Eds.) (2009). Constructivist Instruction: Success or Failure? New York, NY: Routledge.

[3] P. A. Kirschner (2009). Epistemology or Pedagogy, That is the Question.

[4] I have left out the references and a number of intervening paragraphs between the three quoted. I recommend reading the entire article.

Being in the Real World

No, today’s post is not about university professors leaving their ivory towers to encounter the real world. Nor is it about how to equip our students for the twenty-first century skills they will need to find fulfillment in the real world. If that is what you’re looking for, there’s plenty to wade through in the mass media.

Instead, I’m going to muse on what it would be like for a fictional character to suddenly take on flesh. Fictional characters coming to the real world are all the rage now. Just look at the juggernaut that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But there’s an important difference: the superheroes and mutants are not moving from a comic-book-fiction world into a real world. They’re just here in the real world. In the Once Upon A Time TV series, characters who come from fictional fairy tales actually travel via a portal to Planet Earth, albeit mainly constrained in the small town of Storybrooke. Do they come from a “Book” world? Or do they come from another “Physical” realm? And how would it be “adjusting” to our earthly realm?

As part of my holiday reading, I finished the sixth book in Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, “One of our Thursdays is Missing”. While I feel that the overall story is less interesting than the earlier books, there is a fantastic chapter on what it might feel like for a “book” character to physically experience coming alive. The chapter is appropriately titled “Alive”. The protagonist has just made the trip through a “portal” device from BookWorld into the Real World. In her first trip, she is aided by an agent on the ground who has been stationed there for a while.

Paraphrasing Jasper Fforde would not do justice to his description. I’ve italicized the quoted sections in the book to reduce quotation marks. (The quoted sections will be punctuated with some of my musings. So really, these are Fforde’s musings.) Here goes.

I felt a pain in my chest. I didn’t know what it was until, with a sound like a tornado, a hot gush of foul air erupted from this shock, I spontaneously did the opposite and drew in an equally fast gush of air that cooled my teeth and tasted of pine needles.

“It’s called breathing,” came a voice close at hand. “It’s very simple and everyone does it. Just relax and go with the flow.”

“I used to ‘take a breath’ and ‘exhale uneasily’ at home,” I managed to say, “but this is quite different.”

“Those were merely descriptive terms intended to suggest a mood,” came the voice again… “Here you are doing it to stay alive.”

“What’s that random sensation of memories I keep getting?”

“It’s smells. They have a way of firing off recollections...”

That’s one thing we don’t see from the characters in Once Upon A Time or movies with alien invasions. Sometimes the different atmospheres are taken into account requiring some sort of spacesuit or exoskeleton. But more often than not, aliens are able to function in practically the same way. Thor, coming from Asgard, seems just fine on Earth. But maybe he has taken the trip many times and is used to the adjustment, so we don’t see him floundering. Or maybe the atmosphere on Asgard works in the same way as on Midgard. Also, hardly anyone stops to admire the view. Fforde brings to light what might be a major difference between what a book character experiences in his/her own fictional world, and how the actual physical world is much more vivid, and full of extraneous stuff – that would otherwise be distracting to the narrative.

I sat and blinked for some minutes. The view was quite astonishing, not only in range but in detail. I had been used to seeing only what was relevant within a scene. Back home, anything extra would have been unnecessary and was a pasty shade of magnolia with the texture of uncooked dough. Here there was everything, in all directions, in full color and in full detail. Several books’ worth of descriptions were just sitting there… I sat there quite numbed by the overload of sensations.

At this point, the protagonist's helper identifies himself as Agent Square from Flatland. As a two-dimensional being, he experiences three dimensions by moving through and imagining what the square slices measuring out the third spatial dimension look like when compiled. There’s also an interesting discussion about how we three-dimensional beings view time by moving through it in slices. Except that, we can’t quite control the speed and direction in which we move through this fourth dimension. In a previous post, I mused about how one as a reader of a book could move forward or backward at any pace, or jump to different parts of the story at any time in BookWorldTime. But when the BookWorld protagonist enters the real world, she is constrained by the flow of RealWorldTime.

I moved to stand up, but everything felt funny, so I sat down again. “Why does my face feel all draggy?” I asked. “The underneath of my arms too… everything feels all… weighted down.”

“That’ll be gravity,” said Square with a sigh.

“We have gravity in the BookWorld,” I said. “It’s not like this.”

“No, we just talk at though gravity existed. There’s a huge difference. In the BookWorld, gravity is simply useful. Here it is the effect of mass upon space-time. It would be manageable if it were constant, but it isn’t. Acceleration forces can give one a localized gravitational effect that is quite disconcerting…”

“If this were the BookWorld, you’d have one of those watches that counts down from [X time] to add some suspense. Believe me, the plot in this world takes a bit of getting used to. I’ve not done anything for [the boss] for six months. That’s nothing in the BookWorld, barely half a dozen words. Out here it really is six months... The boredom. There’s a limit to how much reality TV one can watch… Now, what do you want to know first?”

“Walking would be a good start.”

Gravity also turns out to be tricky. This passage reminded me of observing toddlers trying to walk for the first time. They toddle. Keeping one’s balance can be tricky, particular if you have a relatively larger head. I just take walking for granted, until I have an accident that impairs my walking ability. Then I start to notice the process of walking. It’s a good thing we can automate and thus filter out of consciousness many of our activities. It would be quite the task trying to breathe, pump blood via the heart, see and smell, all simultaneously while consciously working through the process. Cognitive Overload.

Agent Square turns out to be a good teacher, and walks his student through processes of increasing difficulty. He pushes her to try new things at appropriate times, but also gives her time to digest what she is learning and to automate the process. One of my goals this coming semester in my non-majors class is to monitor cognitive load in my students. I did not do as good a job when I taught the class last year, as I was trying other new things. However, since I’ve decided Not To Textbook the course this coming semester, I feel more freedom to rearrange the units in a way that would make sense both thematically and cognitively. In fact, I started working on this today – my first day back at work after an excellent holiday! Back in the Real World, I suppose.

Bright and Poisonous Colors

Part Four of Hugh Aldersey-Williams’ Periodic Tales begins with a section titled Chromatic Revolution. He starts off with a story about finding his father’s old artists’ paints while clearing out some boxes. Chrome Yellow, Viridian, Vermillion, and Greens “rich in arsenic” are mentioned. It reminded me of my own childhood, reading the paint tubes of an art set, although I’m guessing my paints were less toxic? (Painting was a required course in my elementary school. I was terrible at it.) What I did not know is that the one element that “provided more and brighter artists’ pigments than any other” was cadmium.

Cadmium was discovered by Friedrich Strohmeyer, professor of chemistry and pharmacy at the University of Gottingen. In 1817, he also did double duty as the “inspector of apothecaries”, and it was during one of his inspections that “a preparation of medicinal zinc oxide was clearly not what it was purported to be.” When heated, the substance turned yellow, then orange, but no lead was found upon further analysis. Strohmeyer went to the source (a chemical factory), obtained a sample, and chemically removed the zinc. This left him with a “pea-sized lump of a bluish grey material, rather like zinc in appearance, but shinier”. Cadmium is named after calamine, the zinc ore where it is found. Many new metallic elemental discoveries were made in this way because elements closely related to each other (sometimes by ionic charge, sometimes by ionic size) could substitute each other in an ore. Cadmium is just below zinc in the periodic table. Poisonous mercury is just below cadmium. Zinc, cadmium and mercury are in the same column of our periodic table.

Cadmium sulfide was a hit among painter-artists. By varying the level of different impurities in the salt, many vivid colors became accessible. These ranged from red, orange, yellow and green, although not blue. (Blue has always been a difficult color!) The author writes: “As each new tint became available, it powered in turn the yellow sunsets of Monet, the orange-soaked Arles interiors of Van Gogh…” There was speculation that Van Gogh’s mental state was affected by noxious paint pigments. As recently as 1989, the Rhode Island senator attempted to ban cadmium in pigments to prevent leaching of toxins into the water supply. Artists vocally protested what they saw as ‘chemical censorship’. In fact, paint on canvas doesn’t cycle back into the environment unless the paintings go into the landfill (a horror to artists!). Hence artists’ paint is a drop in the bucket where the commercial use of colored pigments is concerned. Industrial exposure to cadmium, which has many other uses, turns out to be the much greater problem.

Aldersey-Williams writes: “It seems beyond sad – almost a moralistic affront to our capacity for sensuous delight – that so many of the highly coloured chemicals should also be poisonous. This true not only of the salts of cadmium but also of many long-known pigments such as yellow lead-chromate and the vermillion of mercuric sulphide. Poisons in fairy tales often come in coloured bottles, or are coloured themselves. Christian Dior’s counter-intuitively marketed perfume Poison exploits this mythology in a purple glass bottle shaped like an apple.” It’s no wonder that in the TV series Once Upon A Time, the evil queen (of poison apple fame) has purple as her color of magic. Although interestingly, the bright colors of edible apples or poisonous berries are not due to metals but to organic compounds with extended pi-delocalized systems such that electronic transitions are in the visible range of the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum.

While leaves and fruit come in red, orange, yellow and green, you don’t see blue. It’s a tricky color for a variety of reasons. (Incoming brainwave: I think I’ll pose this conundrum to my chemistry students!) There aren’t many blue salts. I learned from Periodic Tales that the great chemist Berzelius prepared various vanadium salts including ones that are bright turquoise and pale sky blue, preserved in test tubes at the Berzelius museum in Stockholm. Most familiar to us, though, are salts of cobalt and copper. Copper(II) sulfate is the standard blue solution found in introductory chemistry labs.

I remember Cobalt Blue being one of the names in an art set paint tube. I did not know that its name comes from an evil spirit associated with one of the four elements of the ancients. Apparently the popularity of the blue hue along with the discovery that smaltite (the cobalt ore) was found in silver mines, led to the Saxon miners blaming their difficult work on the Kobold – a small Earth demon from Germanic middle ages mythology. Aldersey-Williams writes: “The labor was hard and involved exposure to harmful fumes, released when the main ore’s other main ingredient, arsenic was roasted off.” Kobold blues, you might call them, in analogy to ‘cadmium blues’, the symptoms of being poisoned by cadmium vapor.

Octarine is the color of magic in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Only magic users and cats(!) can see it. Eight is the magic number of the Discworld, and Octarine is the eighth color of the EM spectrum. How fitting that magic is associated with the EM spectrum! In that world, magicians would recognize the signs of magic anywhere, and muggles would not. Early this year, there was a campaign to have Element 117 be named Octarine, although Tennesine ended up being chosen. (I should have told my students this when one group used in their “invention of new compounds” assignment this past semester, but I did not know about the campaign until recently.)

Who would have thought colors were so interesting? I’m already leaning to colors and light being the theme of my General Chemistry class next Fall. Wow, I’m really thinking ahead now! First, I have to design my Potions themed class. But maybe I can sneak in some ideas about colored potions!

[For the previous blog post on Periodic Tales, click here. I’ve posted more on this book than any other thus far, excluding the Harry Potter series.]

Counterfactuals, Prophecy and Timelines

I didn’t have to wait long to encounter another story of magic and time travel. One nice perk about having a holiday is being able to get back into bed after a nice breakfast on a cold winter morning and cozy up to a good book. I had been saving Harry Potter and the Cursed Child just for this purpose! Previously I had considered whether I should read the play before watching the live theater production, and one of my colleagues (a Potter-fan) convinced me it was worth doing so. I was not disappointed!

[Spoiler alerts if you keep reading!]

While the script lacks some of the rich description of the surrounding environment (since presumably that is part of the stagework), the narrative has Rowling’s deft touch even though this is a collaborative effort with two other writers. The story moves along briskly with appropriate twists and turns. The central characters, Albus Severus Potter and Scorpius Malfoy, are well-developed as the narrative proceeds. Their fathers, Harry and Draco, have important parts to play. At its heart the story is about fathers and their children. A number of these relationships amongst other characters also make their appearance in the script. Ron and Hermione also make their appearances, while Ginny and McGonagall have more minor roles to play. A new and interesting character named Delphi is also introduced, and I expect her to feature again elsewhere in the Potterverse.

While time travel plays a prominent role in the story, it does not take away from the centrality of the father-child relationship arc, but instead supports the main storyline. By traveling into the past to change an event, in an attempt to influence the future towards a “desired” outcome, a counterfactual scenario can be truly experienced viscerally rather than entertained distantly as merely theoretical. That’s probably why thematic games will always have a following. There’s something about exploring “what if?” scenarios that is fascinating. It explains why Reacting To The Past has proven immersive and engaging in history classes, and why folks like me continue to enjoy complex boardgames, even ones that attempt to recreate life on earth.

In the Potterverse, time travel is not difficult if you are able to get your hands on a Time Turner. Book 3 (Prisoner of Azkaban) is my favorite book in the series with its very clever use of the Time Turner. The difficulty is obtaining this magical object since its use and distribution is under very strict control by the Ministry of Magic. It’s likely they have a Chrono-Division somewhere in the Ministry, alluded to in Book 5 (Order of the Phoenix), akin to the ChronoGuard in Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series. Baddies of all sorts should be trying to get their hands on them; oddly enough that doesn’t seem to happen in the original seven books of the Harry Potter series. Instead, different characters try to “change the future” by acting or reacting to Prophecies.

The bootlegged Time Turner used in Cursed Child is an inferior version, since it is only allows the user to go back in time for a very short five-minute window to make a change. Would the interference enough to significantly change the future on a large-scale, or would it be a mere ripple that affects minor local conditions but essentially not alter the flow of the great river that is the time-course. This is a key conundrum explored in science fiction; there is a rich trove of literature, movies, TV, and storytelling. I’ll be skipping that long discussion. In Cursed Child, the five-minute window means the user is immediately returned to the present (but possessing only one linear timestream of consciousness) – although it would be the present as affected by whatever modification was made by the quick trip into the past. In this book, the effects are significant and the user quickly realizes that the change did not have the desired effect imagined in the grand scheme of things. When one is focused on trying to change the outcome of one isolated event to change the situation in a future isolated situation, the sheer complexity of interactions is nigh impossible to fathom. The moral of the story: The “if only… then…” rationalization is almost always too simplistic in terms of actual outcomes. We are lousy at predicting the future.

This brings us to the question of Prophecy. In the Potterverse, it predicts the future in some way. In Book 3, the seer Sibyl Trelawney goes into a temporary trance during Harry’s final oral exam and predicts the reuniting of the Dark Lord and a trusted servant. In Book 5, Voldemort chases after a prophecy concerning himself and a potential adversary. The prophecies both have a certain vagueness and specificity. Voldemort assumes he is the “Dark Lord” referred to in the prophecy, probably correctly, and essentially self-fulfills the prophecy by attempting to kill the year-old Harry Potter. But it didn’t quite turn out the way he expected. So by “knowing” something about the future, he attempts to change the present. This parallels the time-travel instances in Cursed Child where knowing something about the present fuels the attempt to go back in time and alter a past event.

The Book 3 prophecy is much more specific referring to an event that would happen the very night it was made, so it is clear how it is fulfilled at the book’s conclusion. Interestingly, if the word “tonight” was not in the prophecy then the trusted servant could be Pettigrew but it could also be Crouch Junior. I think that’s a potential flaw in the early book – the over-specificity of the prophecy. But is it possible for prophecies not to be fulfilled? If Voldemort had chosen not to attempt to kill Harry, or if he had not heard the prophecy (it wasn’t made to him after all, and he only knew the first half), would it not have come to past? Possibly. But him being Dark Lord-ish, it was probably only a matter of time before he fulfilled it because this happens to all tyrants as a matter of history. So there might be a counterfactual system where Harry is not the “Chosen One” although the broad strokes of the prophecy are likely to be fulfilled. Could Pettigrew have been stopped on that eventful night in Book 3? Possibly, given the Time Turner allowed the possibility of second Harry stopping him. But rule-following Hermione restrains him. So perhaps Prophecy is not an iron-clad future prediction. Although in all cases, the prophecies are fulfilled. In Cursed Child, this takes place in an alternate timeline.

Can Cursed Child be classified as Book 8 in the series? The narrative meshes well with events in the previous book, hinting at the possibility that the series of outcomes along the main timeline could form a continuum with the previous seven books. The time-altering nature of the story however opens the possibility that this is Book 8a, and there could well be a Book 8b, 8c, etc that follow different timelines. This allows for endless possibilities (a la the Terminator movies). One can imagine also drawing in prequels such as the Fantastic Beasts movie. The Demiguise makes a cameo appearance, except interestingly in Cursed Child, the invisibility is used rather than its future prediction capabilities. The book is also a reminder that interest in counterfactuals is strong! I predict we will see more of this type of literature.

A good card game that explores time travel, paradoxes, alternate timelines and counterfactuals is Chrononauts by Looney Labs. As a bonus, you will probably learn some history. The game is zany and fun, and I’ve logged over 200 games in the past 15 years or so. I recommend the original game first before you try its sequel Early American Chrononauts also by Looney Labs. For a zany book series that is also intellectually stimulating I recommend Jasper Fforde.

G-Chem New Elements End-of-Semester Reflection

The semester is officially done. I finished grading my final exams and submitted final grades to the registrar’s office yesterday. I picked up my student course evaluations today to find out what the students thought about my classes that they haven’t already told me. Today’s post will focus on my first semester General Chemistry class where I’ve threaded an Elements theme throughout the semester. The idea was to inject some creative work into the course, and perhaps have the students wrestle with some of the basic concepts as they design new Elements. For more context, click here for the previous update (in November).

The students turned in their proposals in mid-November. The idea was to ensure they thought about the assignment beforehand and had some idea what would go into their final poster. I tried to provide plenty of feedback in the hope they would do a good job in their final posters. The key missing part at the proposal stage was providing rationales for the properties of their proposed element. Some examples: If it is a super-strong metal, why? If it conducts electricity or heat, why? Why does it have the proposed melting and boiling points? Will it react with oxygen in the air and why?

I was overall pleased with the results. The students did a good job with their posters in both layout and presentation. I had a peer review sheet where each student was assigned to visit the poster of a different group. They had to rate the poster, presentation, and ability of the presenter to answer questions. Each student was also required to present the poster to me and answer my questions. (The students told me this was the most nerve-wracking part.) They had prepared 2-3 minute talks for folks who visited the poster. Because my class presented their poster at a symposium involving five other classes (that were part of the Living Learning Community), student presenters were also visited by other students not in the same class (but who lived in the same residence hall) and also other faculty members.

There were some clever ideas from the students. One group invented a super-heavy element for construction material that was strong yet malleable, and to keep it stable, their new element had a “Jimmy Neutron” to stabilize the large nucleus. Two groups went for light aluminum or titanium analogs, one proposed new technology that used anti-neutrons to reduce the mass by removing neutrons, and the other proposed a new element that could accommodate 2d electrons (which could only form bonds with other 2d electrons). I was pleased to see students propose solid-state structures for their compounds, and not just “molecular” Lewis structures. (They clearly learned from one of the earlier scaffolding assignments.)

As in any group project, some students may be much more knowledgeable than others, and the work is not always equally shared. From what I can tell, only one group ran into some problems because one member wanted to own the project and use only his/her ideas. However, that group ended up with a good final poster and all its members were able to competently present the work individually and answer questions, even some esoteric ones. In other groups, it was clear who understood chemistry and who did not. From questioning the students, there was a correlation between how the students were performing in class and how well they could answer questions related to basic chemistry.

Overall, I think the New Elements project was successful. The students had the opportunity to exercise some creativity. For some students, this also strengthened their basic understanding – however I think this clearly benefited the academically stronger students much more than the weaker students. Overall, I think my scaffolding strategy worked, and provided a thread throughout the semester. The majority of the students enjoyed the project, even though they found it challenging, however a few thought it was less relevant overall to learning the material in the class. (I had asked the students specifically to say something about the project in the free response section when they filled out course evaluations.)

However, I think there were some problems with the setup of my class. Because of the New Elements thread, there were additional assignments. Besides the online (Mastering Chemistry) homework due every class meeting, I also had (themed) problem sets and scaffolded assignments related to the final project. I could have reduced and spaced out some of the assignments better, as there were some stressful periods for students, particularly if they did not plan their time well. I also had take-home exams to give myself more class time for the Elements thread, but I don’t think this worked well at the end. Some students still worked together despite my telling them not to, and as a result did rather poorly on the in-class final exam. The students who worked independently as I instructed aced the final. I had a bimodal distribution on the final exam.

While I had a small class and therefore a small sample size, I think that the project work (in groups) allowed some of the weaker students to skate by without as much impact to their grade throughout the semester, and they did not prepare adequately for the take-home exams. (The exams were worth 2% of the overall grade and students got the full 2% regardless of how they actually did on the exam.) I spent time before every exam reminding them how to prepare for the exam and how to use it as a true “practice” under exam conditions to see if they really knew the material. But I feel despite my best efforts (and there were four exams), only the stronger students benefited. So I think I will go back to in-class exams (worth more of the grade) during the semester. This means I will have less class time, but I think this will lead to better overall outcomes.

At the close of this semester, I’ve been thinking about the cognitive load in my classes. The layering of the New Elements project increased the cognitive load required of my students, and perhaps this is why the stronger students thrived while the weaker students struggled. To some extent this is true of all classrooms with mixed abilities, but the difference between the two groups felt more stark this year, particularly after grading the final exam. This is something I’ll need to think about more carefully as I attempt a new theme in my non-majors class next semester. I’m excited for the class, but I’m also reminded of the need to incorporate the lessons I’ve learned. It’s a good thing to take some time at the end of the semester and reflect on how things went.