Life in the Lab (so far)

So, I've come back to Wellesley a week early to work in one of my geo professors' labs - this is a brief summary of what it's been like so far with lots of pictures :D.

Day 1
On my very first day, I learned about making cups.
Here's what happens (it's quite exciting, really!): First, you set up everything you need - 3 pieces for the 'cup', a mortar and pestle, a scooper, and a piece of film 4 microns thick, and also whatever it is you're making a cup of. 

Next, you place the film on top of one of the body pieces of the cup, and slot the second piece into the first - stretching out the film and securing the two pieces together.

Then you crush up the sample, making an extremely fine powder, which you then mass out on an extremely sensitive scale (so sensitive that it registers when you breathe on it!! neat!), then you pour the crushed sample into the mostly constructed cup, stuff it with cotton  (except that it isn't cotton because that would be silly) and then you cap it. On the cap you write all of the relevant information, and voila! You're done! Except not. Now you have to go wash everything you used (excluding the scale because you used massing paper on that) - but this is also fun because you get to rinse

 everything with ethanol, which makes it all dry faster (since ethanol evaporates faster than water). Super fun :D. 

So. That's how you make cups.

After we made cups, we ran them through a Xepos machine, which uses

 x-rays to determine the elemental composition of the samples you put in the cups. You have to set up what you want it to do on a computer that's off the left edge of the photo, open the helium tanks on the right of the photo, then let it do its thing for a few hours (depending on how many cups you're running). 

And that's Xepos. 

Day 2

On my SECOND day in Dan's lab, I went to both MIT and Harvard - Harvard first, for a group meeting with the people we're running samples for, and also to discuss with some other people the data we've been getting for some of Dan's other projects. Right now we're working on Tar Creek, which is a study of a superfund site where flooding happens, so the study is on the transport of contaminants through flood mechanism (we're looking at tree bark from th

e banks of the river where the trees got completely coated in mud during the flood). We're also looking at soil samples from urban gardening projects where cities give compost that's been sitting in contaminated areas to people to use in their gardens (not realizing its contaminated, of course) - but we're also looking at samples of soil that's been decontaminated but which is slowly becoming re-contaminated just through transport of contaminants through

 the wind (which is pretty dangerous in and of itself, because if they're wind-transportable, then they're inhale-able). The third project is what we're mostly doing for the Harvard folks - a guy there named Jim is studying fish (uh. I'm not allowed to say from where or what specifically he has learned. Wow.), but I didn't start working on this project until day 3. Finally, the fourth project is on a powder from India that women (I think Hindus) trace down the middle of the top of their head, along the part of their hair when they get married. Unfortunately (and that doesn't really cover it) it has an incredibly high lead/mercury content, and since these women are applying it directly to their heads, that's a real problem.  (I just mentioned it to my dad and he says that it shines, hmm.) Of these projects, the first is being done with Harvard, the second with a non-profit, the third we're really just running samples

 for Harvard, and the fourth is for some guy, I don't really know the story behind it. I'm most interested in the last, I confess. 

Anyway, after we went to the group meeting at Harvard, we went to MIT to use their Scanning Electron Microscope (!!!!!) - here's something interesting:

 

^^ SEM at UCONN

SEM at MIT  ^^

On the other hand, now that I'm looking back at the pictures, I think the UCONN one might have been more sensitive - those are carbon nanotubes on the screen...

But I don't actually know. It's entirely possible that in the three years between these two photos, the technology has improved so much that the ginormous piece of equipment on the left has been compacted into the more manageable piece of equipment on the right (and we all know how technology likes to become more compact and sophisticated over time).

This essentially works by shooting a stream of photons at a sample, exciting electrons which then ionize. When the atom regains equilibrium, it has to give off a ray of something (conservation of energy) and there's a detector inside the machine (something about liquid nitrogen? I'm going to go to a class later on how the whole thing works, I'll post something updated then.) that reads the wavelengths and matches them with the wavelengths given off by electron movement in various atoms, which the computer then displays for you to sort through. You generally pick the ones that match with movement to the alpha orbital, as that's the most likely, and then the computer tells you what's what on the sample. Awesome!

Day 3 (today)

Today, I worked with the fish and the Sindoor, and organized the lab. There was snow so Dan couldn't come in, so we just made cups and such. Oh! We got to look at the freezers in the bio wing - this one here was at -80 degrees F. BRR.  ---->

 

And then we hooked up some samples that we need to make cups 

out of to a dry ice freezer (or something like that); that was pretty neat. 

<-- This is Emily doing that.

Tomorrow I have a meeting with Dan to discuss what I've done so far and what role I will play in his research team over the semester (yipes) - it's pretty cool to say that I'm on a research team!

And so, more later. 

p.s. having a terrible time with formatting on here. sigh.

Time Travel

I spend a lot of time thinking about time travel, and how to go about doing it - and I've come to an interesting realization.

It seems to me that our conceptualization of time travel is this: Someone is at point A originally in time, and they end up at point B at some later point in time - perhaps the point in time when you finally discover the secret of time travel and make your time machine. You take said time machine and reverse time and wow! You look around and the aforementioned person is back at point A. (You're off building your time machine still, hopefully - if you haven't altered events with your presence.)

However, if we go by special relativity (which we should, at least until Einstein is proven wrong), then time is all relative. That is to say, if you travel at the speed of light, you and your reference frame will theoretically experience no passage of time. If you travel faster than another person, your watch will run slower relative to theirs. So then, if you take your time machine and put yourself in it and *travel through time*, it seems to me that what will actually happen is you will go back in time - you'll make yourself younger. You're within a reference frame that has been moving continuously slower in relation to outside reference frames until time reverses. Inside your reference frame.

This might suggest that the way to get the time reversal outside of your reference frame is to move slower than everything else - so slow that you hit absolute zero. And then take away heat. (This is Greg's idea, I want you all to know.)

But here's the thing - according to the conceptualization of time that I noted above, we haven't just reversed time, we've reversed movement through space. So, spacetime. Does movement through time include movement through space? Should time travel really be called spacetime travel? And how do you account for the travel through space? How do you get that person from point B back to point A, instead of just making them younger?

Man. Every time I think I've come up with an interesting note about time travel, I realize that I haven't really. Greg and I had this really awesome discussion about it, and at the end he went "So, there can only be two conclusions [of our theoretical time travel test]. Either we can or we can't."

Anyway, this'll be interesting to come back to next time I think I've come up with something.

Added 1/23: interesting point brought up by Dan/his physics teacher: if you travel faster than the speed of light, you're just traveling faster than light. So you could potentially view events that happened in the past, but you couldn't interact with them, or change them in any way. Hmmm.

A Complaint

About misleading descriptions and adjectives and general naming of objects:

My brother and I were driving up from DC yesterday, and to ease the pain of the interminable drive through the snow, we listened to various music and podcasts. Towards the end, we started listening to 'This American Life,' a streaming podcast from Chicago Pubic Radio (www.thisamericanlife.org) - they talked about myriad things, including the effects of the economy on both teenage-hangout levels in malls and adult workers in the malls. They also gave an account of infighting in a group called AORBS (pronounced Ay-orbs), or The Amalgamated Organization of Real Bearded Santas, which brings us to my complaint. The whole of the story was given from the point of view of 'oh man, if Santas fight like this, how can we ever expect there to not be fighting in the world?'

News flash, This American Life!!!! They aren't Santa(s), they aren't even the embodiment of Santa. They're men, plain and simple. Men with beards and similar appearance to that of the much beloved Mr Claus. Perhaps many of them are even quite jolly, and I'm sure a few of them have a sneaking suspicion that they might really be Santa. The fact of the matter is that even though this organization is supposed to represent the round jolly good nature of Christmas, it is made up of men.

Don't hold up men dressing up as Santa as some kind of excuse for the lack of peace in the world. That's like using the word you're trying to define in the definition.

Done now.

Tolstoy, Cormac McCarthy, and Happy New Year

A few days ago, I finally finished Anna Karenina. And by 'finally', I don't mean that I got to the end of it and thought 'whew! I'm glad that's over with!' - I actually felt like the book ended where it needed to. Like the end of the book wasn't the end of the characters' stories, but it was the end of my window into their lives, and that was ok. I think it has the be the mark of a fantastic author when you feel like that, and I'm pretty sure I don't often feel this way. I keep thinking about Harry Potter, and how the story is fantastic and exciting, but full of holes (don't hate me!), like the infrastructure of the story isn't quite substantial enough - like if I look too closely, it'll fall apart. Really what I mean by that is that I don't feel like the characters exist outside of the books, which probably sounds ridiculous and strange, but at the end of Anna Karenina, I felt like the characters would go on, like I'd just looked away and they would continue with their lives. When I finished Harry Potter though, that was all - they can't exist without me to read their stories. It isn't just because Anna Karenina is based in real life and Harry Potter is fiction - I've read a few fantasy books where I felt like the characters would go on without me reading them into being (Lord of the Rings, for example, and some books by David Eddings). I guess what I'm really doing is mourning the loss of my old way of reading, which was just for the story. I know when in my life it changed, but it just keeps getting worse (where by worse, I suppose I mean better, in a way) - it's nice to read something and know that it's good literature, but it's incredibly sad to go back to books I loved when I was younger and find them to be pale shadows of my memories of them. (heh, it's kind of like going to N64 after playing things on the xbox, or PS3 [what sad comparisons I'm making right now] in terms of graphics)

At any rate, Tolstoy is, as I've said, a phenomenal author whom I'm completely in awe of. Shortly after I finished Anna Karenina I picked up Comrac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men, and it was kind of amusing to compare the two of them - Tolstoy is incredibly verbose, but not to the point of excess. Not a single word is unnecessary or out of place. McCarthy, however, is anything but verbose, and perhaps because of this, his passages hold just as much weight, and points where he does write longer passages stand out in both importance and ideas conveyed. What I'm trying to say is that I'm equally in awe of both of these authors for their incredibly different, yet incredibly effective styles, and I'm even more in awe of the fact that we can combine words that everyone knows in so many different ways and get so many different meanings out of them! I know that probably seems like a no-brainer, but man. I think that Tolstoy and McCarthy have styles on completely different sides of the spectrum, but they're both incredibly effective at conveying their ideas. Words are awesome.

I'm always a little bit surprised at how much Cormac McCarthy is able to say with his often short sentences (although actually, I think that sentence length is tied to landscape and plot - he does have longer, sweeping sentences that describe picturesque vistas and open plains - like in All the Pretty Horses) but in times of conflict and fear, the sentences tend to be short (like in The Road, and often in No Country for Old Men). Anyway, CM often talks about life, fate, and faith, and No Country was no different, although it didn't have the obvious focus of The Sunset Limited. It was interesting to think about the importance that Chigurh placed on the coin he tossed for the man's life in the gas station - interesting to think about the journey that the coin took, interesting to think about what Chigurh was thinking ("interesting"). I don't know if this will make sense, or if I'm just rambling on about things that everyone knows, or maybe I've rambled about this on here already, but it's such a backwards way to look at things - I mean, yes, it is fantastic to look back on events and see how things came together, fascinating to look at the trip of the coin and see it's seemingly impossible journey from the metal in the rocks to the coin deciding the man's life, but to go all the way from point B to point A and say that A came about because of B is false. Oh man, I remember now, heh. It's the anthropic principle, and I have thoroughly discussed this, but not on here. : P

Anyway. Happy new year, hey? It's been quite a year, and I mean that in the best way possible :). I've made my resolutions - boring 'be healthier', and 'do your homework on time' ones, but also 'read more for pleasure' and such like that. It's a reasonable list, and things that I look forward to doing. It'll be a good year, I'm pretty sure :D.