K-Oz Gets a Home!!

While i was in Boston on a business trip, Annalisa found a dog at the Humane League.  The newest member of our family is 6-year-old K-Oz (My wife studies Chaos aka Dynamical Systems in math).  He is a very sweet tempered German Shepherd.

K-Oz is helping Jacari wash his face!!!

Nigel with K-Oz.  K-Oz is happy but needs a nap.

From My Day Job--Book Review Published on booksandculture.com

My friend John Wilson just posted this review on his Web site at www.booksandculture.com.  Good book.  Congratulations to John on the 15th anniversary of his magazine:  Books and Culture.


The following article is located at: http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/2010/august/disappearingspoon.html

The Disappearing Spoon

Tales of chemistry, from the heroic to the absurd.

Neil Gussman | posted 8/26/2010

If you have never balanced a chemical equation, if you think chemical bonds are long-term investments in a maker of turpentine or Teflon®, then you may have missed the flurry of books based on the periodic table published in the last several years. You could be excused for thinking Sam Kean has chosen an arcane subject—the map of the chemical elements—for his 400-page book.

The title and cover art are suitably retro. In fact, the old-style title and subtitle—The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements—have almost as many letters (106) as the periodic table has named elements (112 and counting).

For those of us inside the world of chemistry, the first reaction to Kean's book (if you'll pardon the pun) is "another one?" But this young, gifted storyteller has written a book that shares only a chemical icon with other recent volumes on this theme. Kean presents the stories of the elements in all their human drama. The result is a delightful book of interwoven tales that will give even the most highly trained chemist some of the real breadth, history, and drama of the "Central Science." It is also a book that can be read on Southwest Flight 469 from Las Vegas to Baltimore to help pass five hours in an aluminum (Element 13) cylinder with 141 other carbon-based (Element 6) life forms.

Kean weaves together the lives and times of notable savants and scoundrels of chemistry to tell the stories of elements. Chapter 8 opens with fifteen scientists on the cover of Time magazine—the "Men of the Year" for 1960. In the first four decades of the 20th century, Americans earned 20 Nobel prizes in science. In the 1940s and '50s, more than twice that number, 42, earned the coveted prize in half the time.

Then Kean dives into the search for Technetium, the 43rd element and the most difficult to discover of the 92 elements that exist outside nuclear reactors. In the decade before World War II, a couple who were German scientists and Nazi sympathizers, Walter and Ida Noddack, claimed to have discovered Element 43 but were proved wrong. Others tried and failed. Then Emilio Segre, an Italian Jew who escaped the Holocaust by emigrating to America, pinned down the elusive element. Two decades later Segre was on the cover of Time.

After lauding Segre and recounting some of the details of his escape from the fate of Jews under Mussolini, Kean takes Segre down a peg. Explaining how the impetuous chemist missed discovering another element, Kean ties that mistake to the great blunder that led the great American chemist Linus Pauling to miss the structure of DNA. Pauling went on to become the only recipient of two individual Nobel prizes—for Chemistry and Peace—but James Watson and Francis Crick beat Pauling to the discovery of the structure of DNA. In a delightful (and disgusting) aside, Kean says DNA was first discovered almost a century earlier, in 1869, by a Swiss chemist who "poured alcohol and the stomach juice of pigs onto pus-soaked bandages until only a sticky, goopy grayish substance remained." The goop leads to stories about Phosphorus (Element 15) and on through the periodic table. Writing about Pauling, Kean says:

He was the Leonardo of chemistry—the one who, as Leonardo did drawing humans, got the anatomical details right for the first time. And since chemistry is basically the study of the forming and breaking of bonds, Pauling single-handedly modernized the sleepy field. He absolutely deserved one of the greatest scientific compliments ever paid, when a colleague said Pauling proved "that chemistry could be understood rather than being memorized" (emphasis added).

Kean merits the same compliment. The Disappearing Spoon shows that chemistry can be understood in all its rich history of competition, discovery, achievement, and tragedy. In an ideal world where science was central to high school and college learning for all students, Kean's book would be required reading before all the dreary daily details create a lasting, dull impression of chemistry.

And if this delightful book leaves you wanting to know more about how the periodic table works, pick up a copy of The Periodic Kingdom by Peter Atkins. The two books complement each other very well.

Neil Gussman is communications manager at the Chemical Heritage Foundation.

Copyright © 2010 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.

Party at Work--September 30 Simulcast of Ig Nobel Prizes at CHF

I had lunch in near Harvard Square today at Rafiki Bistro with Marc Abrahams, creator and host of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes.  Great hamburger.  And a lot of fun talking to Marc about life in Iraq, and back home.  But the real subject of our lunch conversation was the 20th Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony on September 30 which will be simulcast at Chemical Heritage Foundation where I work.  We are hoping to have a big crowd and several special guests in Philadelphia.

Tickets are almost sold out for the 1200 seats of Harvard's Sanders Theater, where the Ig ceremony is held every year, so Philadelphia may be the best place to eccentric published science get the recognition it deserves.

After leaving Harvard Square, I got stuck in traffic jams on Mass. Ave., Mystic Parkway, and five miles of Route 93 including the Big Dig.  In the rain.  It's nice to be home.

Numbers Update

Early this morning my blog got visit number 75,000.

A few hours later, somewhere in Medford, Mass., I went over 5,000 miles on my bike for the year.
I rode those miles and the last 10 miles of this morning's 30-mile ride in cold rain.  The weather has been bad in Boston for this whole trip.

Looking Up--My View of Sling Load Training

Six huge rotor blades whipped the humid August air, lifting and holding the Chinook helicopter just a few feet off the ground.  Inside the cargo-carrying giant, the pilots waited for the signal to move forward. 

Fifty feet in front of the hovering helicopter sat a Humvee with thick cables attached to its frame at the front and rear.  A soldier crouched on top of the Humvee at either end, holding a four-foot long metal rod with a circular eyelet at the end—looking like the loop end of a huge sewing needle.  The eye is made to fit hooks attached to the belly of Chinook helicopters.

With a thumbs up signal from the flight engineer working with the ground teams, the Chinook tips its plexiglass nose slightly down and rose to 20 feet of altitude as it flew toward the Humvee.  As the big bird approached, the soldiers holding the big cabled hooks begin to get blown around by the front rotor.  A flight engineer, hanging his head and shoulders out of the “Hell Hole” in the belly of the Chinook between the cargo hooks, guides the aircraft slowly down to a hover six feet above the Humvee.

Like rodeo cowboys trying to lasso a longhorn in a hurricane, the soldiers on the Humvee stood up in the swirling air under the Chinook and swung their metal “lassos” toward the hooks on the belly of the Chinook.  When the hook set, the ground crew jumped down from the Humvee and ran 100 meters away through the full Chinook wind blast. As they ran, the pilots slowly lifted the aircraft until the cables are stretched tight.  When the flight engineer signaled that the load was set, the Chinook flew up and away with the 3-ton Humvee swinging gently beneath. 

At that point, the Humvee circled the airfield underneath the Chinook, or the pilots simply went up 50 feet then lowered their cargo back to the ground.  The up and down flight is known among air crews as an elevator drill.  As soon as the cables were slack underneath the Chinook, the crew released the electric hooks.  The cables dropped to the ground as the Chinook flew away.  The air blast from the rotors is so loud that the hooks and cables fall without a sound.

Depending on the preference of the aircrew, the pilots made a slow circle back to their hover point, or they slid the 16-ton aircraft sideways 20 feet above the ground and flew backward before spinning the olive-drab behemoth in its own length, like a Smart car making a u-turn on a narrow street, making it look like some a mythic creature let loose in the middle of Pennsylvania.

The air crews and ground instructors for the all-day exercise were from Bravo Company, 2-104^th General Support Aviation Battalion which returned from a one-year deployment to Iraq in January of 2010.  They trained more than 100 soldiers from 2-28^th Combat (Heavy) Support Battalion.

On Vacation

For the past week I was on vacation in Utah with my family.  I have a lot more pictures to post from the sling load.  But in the meantime, I have 1,000 pictures on a public FLICKR page here.

I plan to transfer most of the photos from Iraq to this page eventually.

Today through Wednesday I am at a chemistry conference in Boston.  It is raining and will be raining through Wednesday.  I rode in the rain yesterday to see my best friend from High School, but will be in meetings all day today.

I'll try to post more pictures in the next few days.

Two of My Favorite People Get Promoted

At first formation on Saturday morning two of the best soldiers in Echo Company got promoted.  Sgt. Jeremy Houck got promoted to Staff Sgt. and Spc. Daniel Lake to Sgt.  In Iraq, Houck was one of leaders on the team that re-built and rewired many buildings all over Tallil Ali Air Base.  We were sent at the last minute to a base that was not ready for a Combat Aviation Brigade and Houck helped to change that--in a big hurry.  Lake is a smart experienced mechanic who spent a very long year doing whatever was required on maintenance teams. He had a sergeant's responsibilities during most of the tour.  His promotion was slowed by several paperwork hassles and long overdue.

Because they are in Echo Company, the ceremony ended with a splash!!!