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Friday Sprog Blogging: the rock cycle.

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The younger Free-Ride offspring shares a diagram from school.

The Rock Cycle

As promised, much of the science so far this school year has been earthy, and part of that is learning where rocks come from. (No, it’s not the stork.)

Sedimentary and Metamorphic

Different kinds of rocks, of course, have different origins. They also present different spelling challenges. (Yes, I’m looking at you, “metamorfic”.)

Igneous and Sediments

I kind of want to ask if there was a discussion about the size cutoff between a sedimentary rock and a sediment. (What’s the biggest you could get and still be a sediment? What’s the smallest clump of compressed sediments that you’d count as a rock?) But my offspring inform me that this kind of request that they spell out distinctions makes me sound like a philosopher or something.

Molten rock

Molten rock is always the prettiest.

But, I’ll confess, I look at all the forces at the center of this schematic of the rock cycle:

Prevailing forces

and I feel a lot of empathy for the rocks. I think these are some of the same forces acting upon me this semester.

Repost: The ethics of snail eradication.

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Since I recently reposted an explanation of one method for dispatching snails and slugs, it seems only fair that I also repost my discussion of whether it’s ethical for me to be killing the snails in my garden to begin with.

In the comments of one of my snail eradication posts, Emily asks some important questions:

I’m curious about how exactly you reason the snail-killing out ethically alongside the vegetarianism. Does the fact that there’s simply no other workable way to deal with the pests mean the benefits of killing them outweigh the ethical problems? Does the fact that they’re molluscs make a big difference? Would you kill mice if they were pests in your house? If you wanted to eat snails, would you? Or maybe the not-wanting-to-kill-animals thing is a relatively small factor in your vegetarianism?

Continue reading→

National Chemistry Week repost: elements.

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Still swamped, but National Chemistry Week must go on. Here’s a post from the archives about one of the basic concepts of chemistry, what defines an element.

As far as chemists are concerned, the world is made up of atoms and various assemblies and modifications thereof. Those atoms and modifications of atoms are, in turn, made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Protons have a +1 charge and a mass of 1.0073 amu [1]. Neutrons have zero charge and a mass of 1.0087 amu. And electrons have a -1 charge and a mass of 5.49 x 10-4 amu. Various combinations of these three will give you atoms, radicals, and ions [2]. Protons and neutrons hang out together in the nucleus of your atom (or radical or ion), while electrons can be thought of as zipping around the nucleus [3].

An element is defined by the number of protons in the nucleus. The element oxygen has 8 protons in the nuclei of its atoms. Any atom (or radical or ion) that has exactly 8 protons is an oxygen atom, and all oxygen atoms (or radicals or ions) have exactly 8 protons. It doesn’t matter how many electrons there are zipping around the nucleus; that determines the net charge. It doesn’t matter how many neutrons there are in the nucleus; that determines the atomic mass (and which isotope of oxygen you have). The number of protons in the nucleus is all that counts when you’re determining the element you’re dealing with.

Lots of compounds (like water) are made up of more than one element (here, hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms in a ratio of 2:1). Elements, however, have molecules that are made up of a single kind of atom — elemental hydrogen is H2, while elemental oxygen comes in two forms, O2 and O3 (ozone). Most textbooks will define an element as a substance that can’t be broken down into simpler substances. (This means that chemists must view protons, neutrons, and electrons not as substances, but as the building blocks from which substances are made.)
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[1] The abbreviations “amu” stands for atomic mass unit. 1 amu = 1.66056 x 10 -27 kg.

[2] Ions are nuclei (or multinuclear assemblies) where the total number of protons does not equal the total number of electrons — meaning they have a net-positive or net-negative charge. For example, Cl– has one more electron zipping around the Cl nucleus than there are protons in that nucleus.

A radical is a nucleus (or a multinuclear assembly) with an unpaired electron that’s “looking for action” (i.e., is generally highly reactive). For example Cl. has the same number of protons and electrons (i.e., a neutral charge), but one of its 17 electrons is not paired, and thus the radical is “looking” for an opportunity to react with something else that will provide an electron to pair with.

Not to get too anthropomorphic or anything …

[3] Strictly speaking, you really shouldn’t think of electrons as having a well-defined location until you go looking for them with a “measurement event”. But as far as anyone can tell, they probably don’t stray too far from the positive charge concentrated in the nucleus.

National Chemistry Week repost: How does salt melt snails?

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It should be noted that for some of us, nearly the whole world comes to us through the lens of chemistry, every week of the year. Here’s another post from the back-catalogue that brings my chemical sensibilities to the garden:

In light of our recent snail eradication project:

Why does salt “melt” snails and slugs? (And how do people manage to prepare escargot without ending up with a big pot of goo?)

To answer this question, let us consider the snail as seen by the chemist:

Snail1.jpg

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National Chemistry Week repost: Periodic table of wow!

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In honor of National Chemistry Week, another post from the archives:

I suspect I’m late to the party on this one, but I just had occasion to check out The Periodic Table of Videos produced at the University of Nottingham. It’s a collection of 118 short videos (ranging in length from approximately one to ten minutes each), one for each of the elements currently in the Periodic Table of the Elements.

I did not watch all 118 of them, but the ones that I did watch covered, among other things:

Continue reading→

Holy mole-y, it’s National Chemistry Week!

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Your humble blogger is swamped with work, but National Chemistry Week (October 17-23) waits for no overworked academic. So, let me offer a nugget from deep in the archives about why I dig chemistry.

What’s so great about chemistry? Of course, if you’re a kid, chemistry has the allure of magic — something might explode! (For those averse to permanent damage, there are plenty of cool chemistry activities that are much safer than whatever my brother did with his store-bought chemistry set to scorch the hell out of our parents’ card table.) But I suspect its real charm for students, at least when it’s taught right, is that it’s a science that looks for the “whys” pretty early in the game. In general, introductory chemistry doesn’t involve much memorization (whether of equations, as in physics, or of Linnaean taxonomy, cell organelles, phases of mitosis, or any of the other important details one has to remember in a biology class). Rather, you learn how to use the Periodic Table almost like a decoder ring to figure out why various substances behave the way they do. From the very beginning, the chemistry student is thinking not just in terms of facts, but in terms of rationalizing those facts. For every weird exception you learn to a regular pattern, the challenge is to understand why it breaks the pattern.

In this chemical universe the student enters, things start to make sense in a way that everyday life hardly ever does. It can be downright seductive. But of course, the orderly chemical universe to which the student is exposed is the product of much labor in laboratories. What happens in the labs can seem chaotic rather than orderly, and sometimes it is only the determination of the chemists to find the underlying order that keeps the going back to the bench to tame the chaos. Needless to say, finding the order in chaos can be seductive, too.

While chemistry often gets props for being a practical subject to pursue (where “practical” usually means leading to gainful employment, and the contrast class is something like philosophy), a lot of the people I know who went into chemistry were led by their hearts more than their heads. Chemistry just felt like the right way to engage with the world.

Primo Levi expressed this as well as anyone else has. Writing about his experiences as a chemistry student in Italy during the rise of Fascism on the eve of World War II, he said he felt

That the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conquerer of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to maintain faithful to that nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed doen in liceo; and come to think of it, it even rhymed! …

[T]he chemistry and physics on which we fed, besides being in themselves nourishments vital in themselves, were the antidotes to Fascism … because they were clear and distinct and verifiable at every step, and not a tissue of lies and emptiness like the radio and newspapers

(The Periodic Table, pp. 45-46.)

Why does it choke me up to see Levi want to conquer matter by understanding it, or to see that his motivation to understand matter is a desire to understand the universe and himself? Coming at a science like this, you can see why a couple centuries ago it was called natural philosophy. As nuts and bolts as the work of a chemist can be — and Levi was for most of his career a chemist who took on problems in different industrial labs, including an IG-Farben lab while he was a prisoner at Auschwitz — the drive here is to understand the substance of reality, to get at knowledge we can be sure of and can hold in common with others. Wanting something like this — to understand of the universe we’re in and how we fit into it, to share our experience with our fellow human beings — feels like the most human of impulses. Science is not the show-offy acting out of the maladjusted braniac, but the labor of the human spirit.

Maybe if more of that got across to science students, and to the public at large, cultivating scientific literacy wouldn’t seem so much like taking a dose of castor oil.

Friday Sprog Blogging: visual traces of science-y thoughts.

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The Free-Rides have been a tad busy (and sneezy, and coughy) this week, which has rather cut into our time for science-focused conversation. However, I was able to extract a couple of drawings from the Free-Ride offspring this morning.

From the elder Free-Ride offspring:

Blowfish

It is possible that the current interest in blowfish is related to neurotoxins, rather than just mechanisms for inflation. (Given that I make my own decaf, I’m not going to let this worry me just yet.)

From the younger Free-Ride offspring:

I’ve been told that the object emerging from the volcano is an atom. If so, obviously it’s not drawn to scale. Also, I suppose I should note that it’s the younger Free-Ride offspring who has been dealing with violent sneezing and coughing this week, which may have played some role in inspiring the subject matter for this drawing (although the camping trip to Lassen at the end of the summer probably had just as much to do with that).

DonorsChoose Science Bloggers for Students Drive 2010.

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Note to longtime readers: This post borrows heavily from posts I have written for past DonorsChoose drives. If you get a feeling of deja vu reading it, you’ve come by it honestly.

In the science-y sectors of the blogosphere, folks frequently bemoan the sorry state of the public’s scientific literacy and engagement. People fret about whether our children are learning what they should about science, math, and critical reasoning. Netizens speculate on the destination of the handbasket in which we seem to be riding.

In light of the big problems that seem insurmountable, we should welcome the opportunity to do something small that can have an immediate impact.

This year, from October 10th through November 9th, a number of science bloggers, whether networked, loosely affiliated, or proudly independent, will be teaming up with DonorsChoose in a philanthropic throwdown for public schools.

DonorsChoose is a site where public school teachers from around the U.S. submit requests for specific needs in their classrooms — from books to science kits, overhead projectors to notebook paper, computer software to field trips — that they can’t meet with the funds they get from their schools (or from donations from their students’ families). Then donors choose which projects they’d like to fund and then kick in the money, whether it’s a little or a lot, to help a proposal become a reality.

Over the last few years, bloggers have rallied their readers to contribute what they can to help fund classroom proposals through DonorsChoose, especially proposals for projects around math and science, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars, funding hundreds of classroom projects, and impacting thousands of students.

Which is great. But there are a whole lot of classrooms out there that still need help.

As economic experts scan the horizon for hopeful signs and note the harbingers of economic recovery, we should not forget that school budgets are still hurting (and are worse, in many cases, than they were last school year, since one-time lumps of stimulus money are gone now). Indeed, public school teachers have been scraping for resources since long before Wall Street’s financial crisis started. Theirs is a less dramatic crisis than a bank failure, but it’s here and it’s real and we can’t afford to wait around for lawmakers on the federal or state level to fix it.

The kids in these classrooms haven’t been making foolish investments. They’ve just been coming to school, expecting to be taught what they need to learn, hoping that learning will be fun. They’re our future scientists, doctors, teachers, decision-makers, care-providers, and neighbors. To create the scientifically literate world we want to live in, let’s help give these kids the education they deserve.

One classroom project at a time, we can make things better for these kids. Joining forces with each other people, even small contributions can make a big difference.

The challenge this year runs October 10 through November 9. We’re overlapping with Earth Science Week (October 10-16, 2010) and National Chemistry Week (October 17-23, 2010), a nice chance for earth science and chemistry fans to add a little philanthropy to their celebrations. There are a bunch of Scientopia bloggers mounting challenges this year (check out some of their challenge pages on our leaderboard), as well as bloggers from other networks (which you can see represented on the challenge’s motherboard). And, since today is the official kick-off, there is plenty of time for other bloggers and their readers to enter the fray!


How It Works:
Follow the links above to your chosen blogger’s challenge on the DonorsChoose website.

Pick a project from the slate the blogger has selected. Or more than one project, if you just can’t choose. (Or, if you really can’t choose, just go with the “Give to the most urgent project” option at the top of the page.)

Donate.

(If you’re the loyal reader of multiple participating blogs and you don’t want to play favorites, you can, of course, donate to multiple challenges! But you’re also allowed to play favorites.)
DonorsChoose will send you a confirmation email. Hold onto it; some bloggers (including me) will be offering donors nifty prizes. Details about the prizes and how to get them will be posted here soon!

Sit back and watch the challenges inch towards their goals, and check the leaderboards to see how many students will be impacted by your generosity.

Even if you can’t make a donation, you can still help!
Spread the word about these challenges using web 2.0 social media modalities. Link your favorite blogger’s challenge page on your MySpace page, or put up a link on Facebook, or FriendFeed, or LiveJournal (or Friendster, or Xanga, or …). Tweet about it on Twitter. Sharing your enthusiasm for this cause may inspire some of your contacts who do have a little money to get involved and give.

Here’s the permalink to my giving page.

I’ll be sharing links to other giving pages, plus details about some fabulous “thank you” prizes, soon. Thanks in advance for your generosity.

Friday Sprog Blogging: rabbit behavior.

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The elder Free-Ride offspring has been spending enough time with Snowflake Free-Ride to have become something of a “rabbit whisperer”. Snowflake herself seems preternaturally aware of when the elder sprog is in range, not to mention very assertive that the in-range sprog must have an audience with Her Royal Fuzziness.

So, it’s working out well for both of them at the moment.

We’ve been talking with the elder Free-Ride offspring about the extent to which Snowflake’s behaviors are being shaped by her interaction with the elder sprog. After one of these discussions, the elder Free-Ride offspring jotted down the following behavioral notes:

Normal:

  • Eats poo.
  • Shakes herself when I stop petting her.
  • Grooms herself when I’m not watching.
  • Very calm when I pet her.

Social:

  • Gnawing at the bars of her run to get to me.

Dr. Free-Ride: What did you mean by normal behaviors?

Elder offspring: Stuff that she probably would have done even if I hadn’t come into her life.

Dr. Free-Ride: How do you know know she grooms herself when you’re not looking?

Elder offspring: Because she grooms herself when she thinks I’m not looking, then stops abruptly when she senses my presence.

Dr. Free-Ride: You didn’t include anything about her nighttime routine (or her morning routine).

Elder offspring: I don’t think that really counts, because I’ve trained her to hop into her hutch for some carrots at night so I can lock her in.

Dr. Free-Ride: So the fact that you’ve trained her make it your behavior, not hers?

Elder offspring: It’s the behavior that I’ve trained her to exhibit. I also trained her to use the paw to push open the hutch door when I unlatch it in the morning.

Dr. Free-Ride: I know you’ve been trying to train her to exhibit some other behavior, and sometimes she has her own ideas about what behavior to exhibit.

Elder offspring: I’ve been trying to train her to come out of the run and sit on my lap for noms and pats. So far, she usually just puts two paws on my lap, then goes back into the run. And when I use carrot sticks instead of whole carrots, she steals them and goes back into the run to eat them.

Dr. Free-Ride: Why do you think she’s resistant to being a lap bunny?

Elder offspring: Maybe she’s still a little afraid of the outside. Maybe she doesn’t want to be a lap bunny.

Dr. Free-Ride: Has Snowflake trained you to do anything?

Elder offspring: Other than giving her carrots and pats, I don’t think so.

What a nine-year-old doesn’t know about teaching.

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Last night, the younger Free-Ride offspring came upon me grading a stack of quizzes. (Suffice it to say that the younger Free-Ride offspring did not grab a pen and offer to help with the grading, although there was a bit of showing off by explaining the informal fallacies on the quiz to me. “Am I as smart as a college student?”)

But then things took a turn that reminded me that there are some pieces of my everyday experience that are total mysteries to a kid.

Younger offspring: Did I say the right thing to explain what was wrong about the reasoning?

Dr. Free-Ride: Pretty much. See for yourself on the answer key.

Younger offspring: (Noticing the answer key is handwritten, in purple ink) Wait, did you have to write the answers yourself?

Dr. Free-Ride: Yes, of course.

Younger offspring: It’s good that you’re smart enough to know the answers.

Dr. Free-Ride: I’d better know the answers, since I wrote the quiz.

Younger offspring: (Eyes widening) You had to write the quiz yourself, too?

Dr. Free-Ride: Kiddo, where did you think quizzes come from?

Younger offspring: I didn’t know.