Playing Doctor

Physicist or Stamp Collector?

I've been wondering lately. Rutherford was a serious scientist. A quote attributed to him has been running through my mind frequently. This quote is of course:

"All science is either physics or stamp collecting."

It was remarked in a talk on TED earlier this year that he may or may not have intended to insult all non-physicists, because he was from New Zealand.

Stamp collecting is obviously an important part of science e.g. Darwin's habit of collecting specimens. He would never have synthesised his concept of evolution without that coming first. In the context of the above quote that synthesis is the 'physics' i.e. the real understanding. It needed the stamp collecting, but the stamp collecting by itself is no where near as significant.

I wonder if I spend too much time on philatelics, or at least not enough time on the physics.

Born to do it

I have realised that only a particular sort of person can really get excited about manganese sites' ligand exchange processes.

It's not really a question of should I be a scientist at all. I feel that I will always want to be involved in what I consider (at the risk of irking other passionate professionals, I can assure you that I mean no offense) the only worthwhile human endeavour: discovery and dissemination of knowledge.

The only question that lurks is: can that involvment be maintained in an economically viable fashion? I intend to find out.

Finally

I finally received notification from the University:

"It is my pleasure to advise you that on 10 September 2008 the Dean of the relevant College approved the award of your degree of Doctor of Philosophy. I congratulate you most warmly on this achievement."

I can have my degree conferred in absentia immediately or I can wait till graduation, even attend. I have a penchant for costume, so I absolutely intend to attend. I have to admit that the science PhD regalia at ANU are quite ridiculous.

Of course the ANU thinks that all the requirements have been completed, but really they are far from done. Tasks still remaining include: Organising at least one dinner, a photographer, regalia hire, plane tickets, friends, family... At least most of those can be resolved in a very short time with enough money, actually much like a PhD.

Four years

This has been going on for four years now. Don't you think you should stop? Get some help?

No more

I completed the final experiments for this thesis last Thursday. I'm particularly proud of that effort because the mass spectrometer was only functioning at 50 % of the usual S/N ratio. Persisting with the endeavour under such trying conditions was a bit frustrating at the time, but the data produced will lead to some cool conclusions, and publication, plus a few more questions.

Now it's just me and the writing. I'm excited to get this done.

Ketamine, not just for breakfast

According to the BBC recreational drug use can stop you from being depressed. Graduate students rejoice! Giving chronically depressed people horse tranquiliser acutally cures their depression in a day, in some cases. Presumably it will be sold as a modified compound that doesn't come with the hallucinations, but why not have a line of product that leaves it in? Its like coke, and coke zero. Some people like the sugar, other people don't; phenylketonuriacs don't like the artificial sweetner.

Did you know that 7-up originally contained lithium in much the same way that Coke had Cocaine? I admit that my citations could not be less rigourous.

Russian around

Supervisory capacity has decided to that I do need to be going to this conference. In Russia. Nevermind that the visa application process is complicated, long and perilously close to being impossible on this time frame. I have to come up with a talk without a complete data set to work, then submit a paper on that data after the conference. But, my supervisors would also like me to submit a paper to another journal before I leave for the conference. This isn't including the poster that I have to write for the conference that is coming up in brisbane three weeks after I get back.

This is of course a wonderful opportunity to meet really famous people in my field and argue that they are wrong and I am right. I wonder if there isn't a hint of 'cruel to be kind' in sending me to this conference. Lambs and slaughters have been mentioned in the last few weeks.

CEI knows best

This is a great article at the CEI website. They respond to Professor Curt Davis's request to desist misrepresenting his research by saying that he obviously doesn't know what he has written himself, as the paper really does show that there is no global warming. It's so great we can have a bunch of economists tell the Professors what their data really means.

The planet is doomed and it's our fault

I was just reading about this new movie called An Inconvenient Truth. It presents Al Gore's recent history and his fight to get global warming viewed as a moral issue instead of a political issue. The idea being that it will involve everyone to do something about it, as oppossed to just liberals and not conservatives.

According to thinkprogress.com (which seems to be rather good reading itself) this movie is so convincing and engaging that 'Big Oil' particularly Exxon are trying to discredit this whole thing. To achieve this end they heavily fund the Competitve Enterprise Institute (who gallingly claim to be 'Advancing Liberty—From the Economy to Ecology') who have produced and intend to air these two 60 second spots on American television where they state that 'CO₂ is life'.

Futher more, going back to Think Progress, there is a story there about Professor Curt Davis from the Univeristy of Missouri-Colombia issuing a statement to the CEI asking them stop misrepresenting his research in their commercials. Specifically citing a point in one of the ads where they say a report showed that the antarctic ice was increasing in thickness.

The research actually did show that, but only in the East interior of the ice sheet, not all over the sheet at the edges where the mass has been shown to be reducing. Interestingly another omission was that this result actually supports the theory of Global Warming which predicts an increase in precipitation in the interior of the continent, leading to an accumulation of ice there. Futhermore, this accumulation might be offset or outweighed by the loss in at the edges.

I can't believe people are actually obstructing this dissemination of knowledge about the extremely near future for Earth. I don't think any one I've talked to around campus here has ever had a differing opinion about this. The consensus is that we're all fucked unless something is done, drastically, 10 years ago. Certian groups of people are willing to condemn the whole planet so they can hold on to a few dollars.

I recycle and ride my bike but maybe I'll be a bit more environmentally conscious from now on. It might time to look at what can be done to reduce my CO₂ footprint (which is helpfully included in my electricity bill every quarter).