Miscellaneous and Sundries

Finally, some real snow. I hear a lot of people complain about how cold it is in Pennsylvania, but I disagree. I think that the winters here are far too warm. When it's really cold, like in upstate New York, the only kind of precipitation that you see is snow. And when it's cold enough, the snow doesn't melt on top of your hat. Here I've seen rain, sleet, freezing rain, hail, and snow all within the last month. Of course, all of that stuff melted and refroze when it hit the ground making for treacherous roads and sidewalks. I need to get back up north.
I should have that opportunity soon enough. Yesterday, my boss has said that he wants me gone by the end of the semester. Sounds good to me. The only problem is that the job market is terrible right now. I think I've resigned myself to applying for post-doc positions, as if a million other people weren't going to be doing the same thing. Maybe the big oil companies have a few industrial post-docs open. They're the only ones with any money. On the bright side, the DOE will probably be well funded under the Obama administration.
Now for something completely different: I watched the end of The Office (US) season three last night and it was awesome. I had watched the UK version and loved it, but really been disappointed in the first season of the US remake. It had basically the same scripts as the UK version, but they didn't really fit the style of Steve Carell who had taken over for the brilliantly dry Ricky Gervais (who is now producing). However, I was persuaded to try the second season and it was far better. The writers seem to have taken it in their own direction, a little more slapstick, for US audiences and it works. I'm laughing my head off and still feeling the pathos of the characters. I've grown to like them all and I was totally stoked at the end of season three when Jim asked Pam out to dinner. Now I'm faced with a dilemma. I could go on and watch seasons four and five, which will be hilarious, or I could stop. If I stop now, I'll always believe that Jim and Pam lived happily ever after. Does anybody have any advice?

Network refugee

Due to the shutdown of the ventilation in the lab, the other grad students and I have been forced to move into the lounge. Although there are network ports at each desk and lab bench, there are none in the lounge. Fortunately, the IT people finally got around to fixing the wireless network in the building.

Unfortunately, my PowerMac G5 (PCIx) didn't come with the optional 802.11g/BlueTooth wireless card installed (the antennas are there, but the actual daughter board is missing). Apple stopped making these some time ago and there are only a few for sale through third-parties for ~$300 each! Sonnet sells a PCI card specifically for PowerPC Macs, but it's pricey at ~$100. Fortunately, the people working on the OS x86 project have a list of PCI wireless cards that are compatible with OS X. Some require patches or driver updates, but most BroadCom based cards work correctly out of the box. I snagged a Linksys WMP54GS from NewEgg for ~$40 and it was detected as a "Third Party Wireless Card" by OS X 10.5.5. The only differences from a real AirPort card are that there is an external antenna (the G5 actually included a tiny external antenna if you bought the wireless option) and there is no 802.1x support.

Connecting to the wireless network was another matter entirely. The department has a wireless network, but it requires 802.1x authentication. The University's wireless network runs in parallel and requires a VPN connection. Until very recently, connecting required the Cisco VPN client, which, in my experience, has been nothing but terrible. It has a wretched user interface that sticks out like a sore thumb for Mac users and constantly drops connections. I was able to make it automatically connect by tweaking the University's .pcf config file, but that was a workaround at best. To add insult to injury, the client installs a kernel extension that hijacks any connection attempts by Apple's VPN client (it can be removed using an uninstall script buried in /usr/bin/). Fortunately, and much to my surprise, the recent deluge of iPhone users on campus has apparently persuaded the ITS people to configure their VPN servers to accept standard connections (although their knowledge base says otherwise). Now I'm using Apple's integrated VPN client and I'm all webbed up to netpages, but I'll never get those hours of my life back. Thanks, Cisco.

Bling crib

I saw the following image of Roger Hiorns' Seizure installation over at Boing Boing and was struck by the beauty of it. The color is nice and I'm sure the artist is challenging perceptions or something, but I love the huge single crystals. I've tried to grow countless crystals for x-ray analysis with very mixed results. People tell me that growing single crystals is more of an art than a science, but one thing of which I am certain is that you need to grow them slowly. That appears to be what the artist did in this case. (It also helps that he wasn't trying to grow air-sensitive organometallic complexes.)





From the photos it appears that the artist waterproofed an apartment in an abandoned building and filled it with 80 kL of hot, saturated copper(II) sulfate (solfato di rame) solution. As the solution cooled, copper(II) sulfate pentahydrate crystallized on every surface in the room. I thought this was timely since I was playing around with copper(II) sulfate today. I dissolved it in water and added sodium carbonate to precipitate copper(II) carbonate. Then I mixed that with excess carbon and heated it in a crucible to smelt metallic copper. Maybe I'll get out the oxygen torch tomorrow and see if I can make silver from that big jar of silver chloride waste in my hood.

More photos can be found here and here.

You deserved better, Saul

In September, this blog endorsed Saul Tigh and Laura Roslyn for president. Yesterday's defeat is the manifestation of the libelous rumours that the media has so industriously circulated. They have delivered our fleet right into the jaws of the Cylons. Perhaps the Lords have merely given us the leadership we deserve. In any case, I'm too upset to comment further.

Mystery lump

Can you guess what this is?



A) Alien face-hugger pod
B) Cow udder
C) Yam
D) Scrotum

ɔ :ɹәʍsuɐ

Dead man's party

Happy Halloween! When it came to choosing a costume this year, I considered many options. I could have been my evil, mirror-universe self, but I couldn't grow a goatee. I could also have been a mad scientist, but that wouldn't really be a costume. Ultimately I collaborated with Matt and we chose the best costumes ever: our boss.

The boss was a good sport about it. He didn't beat or fire us.
On a different note, I made up some mix tapes for Betty Jo to take to her sister's Halloween party. The totally sweet playlist follows.
Disc 1:

Track	Name	Artist
1	Dead Man's Party	Oingo Boingo
2	Cry Little Sister	Gerard McMann
3	People are Strange (Doors cover)	Echo and the Bunnymen
4	Bad Moon Rising	Creedence Clearwater Revival
5	The Devil Went Down to Georgia (Charlie Daniels Band cover)	Primus
6	Somebody's Watching Me	Rockwell
7	Ghostbusters	Ray Parker Jr.
8	Don't Fear the Reaper	Blue Öyster Cult
9	Hungry Like The Wolf	Duran Duran
10	Monster Mash	Misfits
11	Pet Sematary (Single Version)	The Ramones
12	Psycho Killer	Talking Heads
13	Devil Inside	INXS
14	Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)	David Bowie
15	Superstition	Stevie Wonder
16	Tombstone Shadow	Creedence Clearwater Revival
17	Werewolves of London (Colour of Money)	Warren Zevon
18	Thriller	Michael Jackson

Disc 2:

Track	Name	Artist
1	This Is Halloween (Danny Elfman cover)	Marilyn Manson
2	Bad Things	Jace Everett
3	Lotion	Greenskeepers
4	Sympathy For The Devil	Guns N' Roses
5	Hell	Squirrel Nut Zippers
6	When You're Evil	Voltaire
7	Bark At The Moon	Ozzy Osbourne
8	Devil's Got a Holda Me	Colour
9	Highway To Hell	AC/DC
10	Murder By Numbers	The Police
11	Dead Fish on the Banks	The Goodnight Loving
12	Chase the Devil	Max Romeo
13	Pretend that we're dead	L7
14	Possum Kingdom	Toadies
15	We Must Bury You	Katatonia
16	Only To Haunt You	The Von Bondies
17	Red Right Hand	Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds
18	Magic Dance	David Bowie

Disc 3:

Track	Name	Artist
1	Satan Is My Master	Ben Folds Five
2	Psycho Therapy	Skid Row
3	I Put A Spell On You	Creedence Clearwater Revival
4	The Boogie Monster	Gnarls Barkley
5	Living Dead Girl	Rob Zombie
6	Dracula	Gorillaz
7	Halloween	Dave Matthews Band
8	Hells Bells	AC/DC
9	Beetle-Snake	Danny Elfman
10	Soul Dracula	Hot Blood
11	Weird Science	Oingo Boingo
12	Satan Is My Motor	Cake
13	Taste Of Blood	Mazzy Star
14	Mary Anne	GWAR
15	Walking With A Ghost In Paris (Tegan & Sara vs. Mylo)	Party Ben
16	Abracadabr	Steve Miller Band
17	Black Magic Woman	Santana
18	Oogie Boogie's Song	Danny Elfman
19	Gonna Kill U	GWAR

Over the rainbow

I was in the lab yesterday drying and distilling some triethylamine for one of my projects. On a whim, I used a crystalizing dish full of copper shot instead of a heating mantle, oil bath, or sand bath. The resulting rainbow of copper brought a little joy into my day. Perhaps there is a lesson about grad school to be learned here... nah.

The rainbow resulted from the different rates of oxidation across the temperature gradient in the dish (~300 °C to 80 °C). There is a more thorough explanation for the phenomina in "Optical characterization of thin thermal oxide films on copper by ellipsometry" Derin, H.; Kantarli, K. Appl. Phys. A 2002, 75, 391–395, DOI: 10.1007/s003390100989

A copper oxide film grown thermally on a copper surface can be distinguished by the color of reflected light from the
copper oxide–copper film system. If the film grown on copper is cuprous oxide (Cu₂O), the observed color changes from purple to blue, green, yellow and red depending on oxide thickness. However, cupric oxide (CuO) grown on a copper surface is black... The reflectance spectra in the visible region for the thick copper film and copper oxide–copper structures, for different oxide thicknesses, are shown in Fig. 8. The reflectance minimum that begins to show itself after the first oxidation time shifts towards long wavelengths as the thickness of oxide film increases. The observed colors of these samples changed from green to yellow for the oxide thicknesses given in Fig. 8. These colors arise from the reflectance drop passing a minimum at wavelengths between 4000 and 6000 Å in the reflectance spectrum of the Cu₂O–Cu system. If the oxide films were CuO, the reflectance value would be zero for all wavelengths in the visible and therefore all samples of different oxide thickness would be black... The reflectance minima observed in Fig. 8 arise from the destructive interference of rays reflected from the air–copper oxide and copper oxide–copper interfaces.