personal{ identity

It's time for a change, I think. I learned something really important about myself this year: passion for my work- my science- left me intensely vulnerable. Everyone I trusted knew how best to destroy me. And many of them have neatly taken advantage of this, and continue to do so.

I can't risk this scale of devastation again. Distance has shown me that I do know how to breathe when I'm not holding a pipetter; that things outside a microscope can be huge and beautiful; that I can think without gedakenexperiment, with some practice. Maybe I will eventually know who I am outside the lab. The scientific enterprise will roll on without me; with the scale of corruption I observed this spring, perhaps it's better that I no longer muddy those waters with techniques, work and actual data. No real facts are in danger of discovery in many labs at my former institution.

Scum-sucking pissant motherfucking assholes are pretty much a constant anywhere you go. But I can- I must- make their job more difficult. So here it is: I don't know what I'm going to do now. I just know what I won't.

chemistry { EU Chemistry video

science { Biofuel on Jet liner

Interesting.

Algae and a plant that renews carbon into degraded soil. I like these solutions.

science/nature { First the bees, now the bats...

NYT Science article about the mysterious die off of bats around New York (this seems similar to the bee die off, which I believe was caused by a virus).

Wildlife biologists fear a significant die-off in about 15 caves and mines in New York, as well as at sites in Massachusetts and Vermont. Whatever is killing the bats leaves them unusually thin and, in some cases, dotted with a white fungus. Bat experts fear that what they call White Nose Syndrome may spell doom for several species that keep insect pests under control.

casual_friday { Tomorrow my schedule will be busy

So casual Friday today!

Uh, yeah, I am a Scientist...

'Scientist', Dandy Warhols

tech/energy/science { If this is true, it would be so cool

Sunlight to Petrol. Reverse conversion of CO2 into fuel.

Seems like Science Fiction, but I hope it actually works, the chemical catalyst process seems sound. It will also be the closest to closing the loop as we have come so far.

I also don't think it will 15-20 years out, unless the big energy consortiums stymie this like they've done to other alternative energy research. If they were smart, they would adopt and fund this (which in turn could bring a viable large scale implementation reality in probably under a decade) and do as suggested by starting with these systems installed into existing power producing facilities to reclaim CO2 for recycling. Then expand it into a system that reclaim excess (and note I said excess) CO2 levels from the atmosphere.

Projecting this ahead, my concerns would be that if someone had developed an efficient removal process to scrub the CO2 from the air, how would it impact plant life? Would we, ironically, cool the planet too fast? We would have to strike a balance, which can be problematic with profit driven entities.

But, I like this idea, it will be a good bridging technology to help extend what resources we have and buy us some more time to develop better renewable and alternative energy sources.

science { The Pill

Good?
Bad?

Read this (and the link it sources).

science { its all relative

Very cool story link over on Omninerd: http://www.omninerd.com/2007/03/31/news/1204

It discusses a hypothesis by Dr. Vay using Special Relativity to reduce the time to simulate systems with multiple dimensions of scale (long/short) in both distance and time. Very cool stuff.

From the abstract:

Noninvariance of Space- and Time-Scale Ranges under a Lorentz Transformation and the Implications for the Study of Relativistic Interactions

J.-L. Vay
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA

(Received 16 January 2007; published 30 March 2007)

We present an analysis which shows that the ranges of space and time scales spanned by a system are not invariant under Lorentz transformation. This implies the existence of a frame of reference which minimizes an aggregate measure of the range of space and time scales. Such a frame is derived, for example, for the following cases: free electron laser, laser-plasma accelerator, and particle beams interacting with electron clouds. The implications for experimental, theoretical, and numerical studies are discussed. The most immediate relevance is the reduction by orders of magnitude in computer simulation run times for such systems.

Omninerd's tiny overview said his first test reduced the compute time from a week down to 30 minutes. This could represent a great leap in scientific study in the field of physics if this catches on.