Swans on Tea

The nightmare of any and every PhD student writing his or her thesis: My laptop was stolen with all my thesis work on it.

I was so paranoid about the lab catching fire and destroying my thesis that I had it on two computers and had about five backup copies. On floppy disks, which was the style of the times, at least one of which was always at home. If the whole science building imploded, I would have a copy that was at most one day’s worth of writing or set of revisions out of date.

Also, having grown up and done high school and college papers in an era before word processors (ask me about my fun with carbon paper!), I am quite aware how much time I saved being able to write my thesis on a computer.

The discussion of jargon has reminded me of a story told to me by a colleague. As this is at least a third-hand accounting, I will cast this as fiction, but based on a (probably) true story, and given that I have either forgotten or was never told the names of those involved, their anonymity is protected. (I am sure I have forgotten some details and it undoubtedly contains some embellishment.)

This story involves a teaching assistant working in an advanced lab class involving electronics, helping the students with their lab projects as needed. A student was having some trouble with his circuit and after unsuccessful attempts to diagnose the problem, went to the TA for help.

Student – “I’m stuck. Something isn’t working right.”

TA – “OK, let’s have a look” (TA checks a few things and then finally traces it to the power supply and opens it up and pokes around). “Ah, here’s your problem: you have a dead cricket.”

At this point the student undergoes an attitudinal phase change: “Oh for &@%#’s sake I am SO sick of all this @!$*& jargon! What the hell is a dead cricket? Can’t you just speak some plain English for a change? You physics people make this all too confusing! What do you mean it’s a dead cricket?”

At which point the TA show the student the power supply, and points to the dead bug — a cricket — that was connecting the + and — electrodes inside and was shorting out the power supply. “I mean it’s a dead cricket.”

I wasn’t at the Science Online session that, in the Nth retelling, sounded like it might have turned into “the Sharks vs the Jets at the dance” square-off. But Matthew Francis was, and gives his perspective: In defense of jargon and expertise

Carl Zimmer—a writer I greatly respect, even if he does write about parasites, a subject that makes me squirm—began the pile-on by saying that when a Ph.D. scientist wants to explain something, they often start with a question, then drop a textbook on you. (Ironically, Carl is one of the few people I know who actually wrote a textbook.) Some other people evidently took that as permission to speak ill of all professional scientists and experts. One person stated strongly that experts are all bad at science communication, because they use too much jargon.

I do have some strong opinions on this. I’ve posted on this before and I think there’s a danger in asserting some of the extreme positions on the topic. There’s also the problem of properly defining the problem so that the scientists and journalists don’t just talk past each other. Plus the issue of the job of scientists as compared to the job of journalists.

What constitutes jargon? Some is obvious — when acronyms and abbreviations appear, you might just be a redneck using jargon. In my field of atomic physics I will throw around terms like MOT and AOM, or occasionally speak of a BEC. That’s the terminology of the job, and I don’t expect people outside my field to necessarily know what I mean. (in case you are curious, MOT = magneto-optical trap, AOM = Acousto-Optical Modulator and BEC = Bose-Einstein Condensate). I think it’s pretty obvious that not explaining what these terms mean is a barrier to be avoided. I don’t think that’s the problem. If you’re throwing those terms around while attempting to communicate with a lay audience, you’re not winning.

I believe the issue is at a lower level. I think there’s an element of “I know it when I see it” to other terminology, but where to draw the line is a grey area. To use some examples from physics, are momentum or energy jargon? If I speak of the conservation of either, is there a barrier to understanding which is the terminology, or is it a lack of scientific literacy? This is an ongoing debate and I think that the testy exchanges between scientists and journalists will continue of we don’t resolve what we mean. When do basic concepts and their names or descriptions become jargon?

There is also the issue, as I mentioned, of defining what the job is, and I come at this from the perspective of being a scientist. Most scientists are not hired to communicate their work to the public. That’s an acquired skill. If you want to speak to a scientist, you need to learn the language, just as if you want to go to an area that doesn’t communicate in your language, it behooves you to learn that language. That is would be a good idea to train scientists to do a better job of communicating to the public (and I think it is) is a separate issue. But I suspect most scientists would think it a waste of time: We have a Public Information/Affairs Officer for that! coupled with I want to do research. There has to be a general feeling that such effort has value. Scientists have to prioritize their time, so if this is a desired goal, make sure that such communication is valued by the institutions where the scientists work.

If this communication is in the form of a discussion, we get back to the issue of meeting the scientists halfway. When someone with little to no background in a certain subject wants to pop in and be a part of the conversation, it’s a huge waste of time to expect a scientist to fill all of that background in — imagine someone chiming in on a discussion of an atomic physics experiment but has no idea what conservation of angular momentum is, or someone claiming that evolution is wrong because humans don’t have wings. Or this. In situations like that, I feel no hesitation to “drop a textbook” on someone.

To be fair, I don’t know exactly what Carl meant by the phrase, but I also haven’t seen anything that clarifies the issue on his blog. I would love there to be a reasoned discussion on the subject rather than having people reach for their blamethrowers every time this comes up.

Funneling the sun’s energy

[Molybdenum disulfide] has a crucial characteristic, known as a bandgap, that allows it to be made into solar cells or integrated circuits. But unlike silicon, now used in most solar cells, placing the film under strain in the “solar energy funnel” configuration causes its bandgap to vary across the surface, so that different parts of it respond to different colors of light.

Trivia: Molybdenum disulfide also is used as a vacuum lubricant/anti-seizing agent (its use is critical if you have metal-on-metal contact if the metals are the same); it’s similar in effect to graphite, but has a vary low vapor pressure. There’s also the fun of it being very messy — it’ll be all over you in a flash, like a toddler playing in mud.

This SMBC comic showing a physics-y practical joke reminds me: you may recall that last spring, somebody filled a colleague’s office waist-deep with balloons.

Playing on that, I created the illusion of filling an office with packing peanuts.

It’s just one grocery bag of peanuts filling the window, though.

We had a film crew from the History Channel at the Observatory a few days ago, filming a segment for an upcoming special on inventions that changed the world. One of these is the clock, so naturally they wanted to speak to some people who could tell them about clocks. I showed them around the lab and they liked the setting a lot more than any of our operational clocks; they’re all nicely packaged up and quite boring. (One type — the hydrogen maser — is literally a black box, and the fountain physics package looks like a water heater.)

So they filmed a segment in our lab, and since I was there making sure they didn’t touch anything they shouldn’t be touching (they didn’t — they were quite well-behaved), they had me and one of my lab-mates stand in the background, pretending to work at one of the optical tables. We might end up on screen for ten seconds or so in the final cut.

Being geeks meant that we drooled a bit over the equipment that they brought. This is part of their lighting system, a bank of LEDs, which has the advantage over traditional equipment that it draws much less power since LEDs are much more efficient. This means they can run it off of a battery and not have to worry about whether there is an outlet nearby, and it also doesn’t heat up very much.

With the lights at full power it saturates the camera.

Turned down a bit you can see the LEDs a little more clearly.

Several weeks ago we had an office discussion that eventually got around to xkcd and the fascination with ball pits, to pranks involving filling up a cubicle with balls or packing peanuts. The problem with such pranks, it was observed, is that balls are expensive and balls or peanuts take up the same volume ahead of time — storage is an issue. But balloons … they don’t suffer from this problem. You could fill a colleague’s office with balloons.

“That would be cool,” that colleague was heard to utter.

To me, such a statement is an invitation. It would be rude to not fill that person’s office with balloons, should such an opportunity arise, and I fear that someone might do it. So it got me thinking. How would one go about doing such a thing? (Not that I would do such a dastardly thing — I wouldn’t want to expose myself to a wrongful breath suit)

First thing would be to obtain a pump. Double-action, so it fills on both the up- and down-stroke.

When filling the balloons, I would use a balloon clip to speed things up (tying is such a pain) and would find that twisting the neck is important, otherwise the air would tend to quickly leak out.

Then, I would start filling the office. Maybe during lunch hour, or at odd times during the day (and staying late to ensure my real work was done). Get an idea of how many balloons I and any co-conspirators could fill. The progress after one day might look something like this

After four days, it might look something like this

I’ll bet with some help I could use up 200 12″ balloons and 122 (50+72) 17″ balloons, along with a few balloon-animal style balloons (which would be close to useless, since they take up so little volume). With that many, I’d probably notice that there is significant balloon-stink. And I would find the non-stick agent they use (probably cornstarch) to be really annoying after a while.

To be especially devious I might even fill some of the balloons with confetti, so that popping them all would become more of a challenge. I might be tempted to also fill some with helium, but they wouldn’t survive the weekend, so I wouldn’t bother. I’d probably find that about 10% of the balloons would be lost to defect and breakage, and would be amused by the occasional “boom” coming from the office. I’ll bet it would remind me of the episode of the Simpsons where Homer becomes the Beer Baron (Homer vs. the 18th Amendment), and his stills kept blowing up.

If I were to do such a thing.

We were working on a laser system recently (and by we I mean someone in the group other than me, because if it were me, I would say I’ve been working on the laser, all the live long day. But I digress…) The laser system is fiber-coupled, which means it is now umbilically tethered to other equipment, and can’t venture far from its mommy. Which puts it right behind a door, and that puts in danger of being whacked (Honeymooners style rather than Goodfellas style), so we wanted to eliminate traffic through the door. It’s been my experience that simple signs* (like “Keep Out”) are ignored, so I posted a warning on some yellow label tape, and snark ensued.

(click to unleash the full tiger)

(N6 is our IT department, and NMCI is a locally-much-reviled navy/marine computer infrastructure + network that almost everybody tries to avoid using. We hates it.)

*We all have experience with “Wet Paint” or “Danger — Hot” signs, and people touching, just to make sure, or some reverse-psychological compulsion. As a result I’m tempted to put “Do Not Lick” signs on some equipment, because of the inner Homer Simpson some people have will shout, “Oh Yeah? I’ll show you!” and tongue marks will appear. Best to put them on the high-voltage devices.

Flat-ish horizontal space always seems to be at a premium in any lab I’ve worked, and it always fills up. Portable area, which isn’t on the floor (less bending and lifting), is even more so — we have several carts that are supposed to be for temporary equipment, but “temporary” is subjective — sometimes the cart sits there for months on end. Since that invariably leaves nothing free, we have this:

No place for people to sit, but the frequency synthesizer and some tools/components can relax. It gets bad enough that there are times when only one lab stool is free, but it turns out not to be a big deal, since only one section of lab bench (where the best soldering station is located) is remotely likely have any free space on it.

Found a bottle in the back corner of the fire locker recently. This dates back to the early days of the lab, when the shop shared some storage space with us.

This was really good acetone for cleaning vacuum parts, and we didn’t want anyone to mistake it for the cheaper acetone one might use to degrease parts. It’s just a matter of putting it in terms a wider audience might understand.

When last we left our intrepid physicists, they (meaning we) had, after many trials and tribulations, found a magnetic washer that was messin’ with our clock. We removed it, killed it and had it stuffed and mounted on the wall. A couple of you posted congratulatory notes on the success of the mission. I had delayed posting the story until we had confirmed that the vacuum was intact, because Murphy has a way of penalizing premature celebration. And the vacuum was fine the next day. Nope, no problems with the vacuum.

But I still should have waited. The problem is that there was still an icky nasty foreign magnetic field. At first we thought that maybe we (meaning I) had screwed up the shields by getting a magnet too close. And by too close, I mean I accidentally waved my hand too close to one part and heard a resounding THUNK! as the magnetic attraction (however the funk that works) overwhelmed my grip. We routinely degauss the shields, but there’s always the spectre of “burning” in a strong enough localized field that the degauss-o-tron can’t handle. That made for a bit of stomach acid on my part until we confirmed that the shields were fine. The problem was localized to the location of another bolt.

Yikes.

But it wasn’t just a washer this time. There was another one, even though we had asked the magic eight-ball if the problem was fixed and we got a “Signs point to YES” answer. At this point we were incredibly paranoid and with good reason — the pathology was far more sinister. We had noticed that some of the titanium bolts we used would have titanium chips inside the socket head, from the broaching process used to create the hexagonal shape. But they’re titanium chips, right? It’s only a problem if they keep you from tightening the bolt. Or so we had thought, and while we did clean the bolts up, we weren’t as anal meticulous as we needed to be: the problem (most likely one, at least) is that the tool itself is steel, and tools will occasionally chip. And that chip can get caught in with the broaching chips, lodged inside the cap-screw, and that, my friends, is pure evil.

So we scraped and tested — I did my best Nick Stokes impersonation and gathered the specks on some tape so I could wave it in front of the detector, and pretty soon we found one that buried the needle (metaphorically, at least; it was a digital meter)

That’s the one who slimed me. The ugly little spud above the 5″ line. (Yes, we have English-system rulers in the lab. They are a nanosecond long.)

Everything seems to be fine now. This time I waited until I could check that things were running well, and confirm we’re moving on to tackling the next gremlin in the lab.

Imagine, as I sometime ask, that you are doing an experiment which is very sensitive to external magnetic fields. (Like, oh, I don’t know, an atomic clock). And you find evidence of some stray field gremlin that has taken up residence. Since every previous time this has happened it has been the result of a thermoelectric current, you might be lulled into thinking that it’s the same thing, and fixing it will be a piece of cake. A colleague might even announce something to that effect: “It’s a current. It’s always a current. If there’s one thing you can depend on, it’s that stray fields are always currents.”

Welcome to the phenomenon of the sportscaster’s curse.

The sportscaster’s curse, in case you’re not familiar with it, is a phenomenon seen during sportscasts, in which the announcer will basically guarantee an outcome, which then dooms the effort to failure. The athlete is tagged as “Mister Automatic” in some way, with a mention of how he hasn’t missed a free throw/short putt/chip-shot field goal in X attempts, at which point the attempt clangs off the upright or rim, or lips out of the cup. (I’m sure a fair bit of confirmation bias is present here, since the curse doesn’t strike every time, but I cringe nonetheless if it’s a player on my team being lauded for his reliability)

So this is what happened. After we convinced ourselves that it was a simple problem and a quick fix, as happened earlier, we took all the steps to fix it. These steps include taking off the nested layers of magnetic shielding which make the fountain look like a Russian-doll hot-water heater. (or really just a water heater, because you don’t need to heat the water if it’s already hot)

(Such a device might look something like this)

Nada. No obvious connections. We let it cool down to room temperature to minimize gradients and reassembled, but there was no change in the signal. OK, disassemble again and start checking for some magnetic component. But we’re looking for a milligauss-ish field, which isn’t going to be seen amidst the half a gauss of the earth’s field, so the only real way to do this systematically is to change one thing and reassemble it so we can look at the signal in a shielded environment.

We did that a lot over the past few days.

We finally decided that looking with a magnet might be a good idea — a strong one might stick to the offending component. There shouldn’t be any downside — the nonmagnetic materials aren’t going to become magnetized, and if there is a magnetic part, it will only change the scale of the already-existing problem. The latter is exactly what happened. The magnet didn’t stick to anything, but all of the sudden (after yet another reassembling and degaussing of the shields) the problem was much bigger — we had induced more magnetization, and that made it easier to find the offending component. Kinda like finding a needle in a haystack by being able to make the needle a lot bigger.

It was the salmon mousse a washer on a bolt in the vacuum system. Somehow a shiny stainless steel washer had successfully been hiding among the copper ones, and nobody noticed; it either had acquired a similar-looking tarnish, or because of the shininess it looked coppery when it was in the bin. In any event, transplant surgery was indicated and carried out successfully without a vacuum breach (which is good because losing vacuum would have sucked in all the wrong ways)