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.

Professional Development

You might be asking yourself, "Why haven't there been any new posts from that skeptical chemist?" Well, the answer is professional development. Every year, the Department of Chemistry hosts a recruiting event, Sponsors' Day, where the senior graduate students are invited to present posters and résumés for the consideration of invited recruiters. This year, Sponsors' Day lined up with the University's annual career fair. Between the two, the blog had to go on the back burner. Sorry.

The career fair was, as always, a cattle call. All of the employers were looking for engineers or undergrads and I got the feeling that I had educated myself out of the job market. In any case, the winner for coolest employer must have been the Aberdeen Proving Ground. During the description of their work, the recruiter said "blow up" at least four times while standing in front of a video of stuff blowing up. How awesome is that?

Sponsors' Day consisted of me standing next to my poster for three hours while trying to avoid blinding sunlight. The only people that stopped to hear my spiel were two recruiters that had already signed up to interview me. I wondered if I could have saved myself the trouble of making a poster and slept in that day. In the end, it all went pretty well. Nobody noticed that I had written "Colymerization" in my poster title, and I got five screening interviews with some good employers.

The dark horse employer was VWR, which was recruiting PhDs for management and sales positions. I'll admit that the thought of giving up research has occurred to me (and pretty much every PhD candidate that I know), but I'm not sure that I want to give up all this fame and fortune just yet. Seriously though, I imagine that getting back into research or academics would be difficult after a couple of years if I decided that I didn't like management.

Chipmunks' Labor Day Special

While on my way to the Berkey Creamery with Eden, Lisa, and Richard on Monday, we came across a baby chipmunk on the sidewalk. Thinking it was lost, I put it back in the bushes for its mother to find. Unfortunately, we found two more right around the corner, one of which had an open wound. They were old enough that they had their fur and were able to scoot around on the sidewalk, but their eyes weren't open enough to see where they were going. They had all the elements of cuteness: fuzzy, helpless, and tiny with baby proportions! We concluded that their mother had died and they had been driven out by thirst so we gathered them up in my hat and took them to Centre Wildlife Care. My hopes aren't high for the injured one, but I'm sure Robyn and her crew will do their best.

Three orphaned chipmunks in my hat. The wounded one is in the upper-right.

UPDATE:
Richard spoke with Robyn and she said that two of the chipmunks died the first day and the third died unexpectedly a few days later. She said that was surprising since they had good luck with baby chipmunks in the past. So it goes.

Tigh for president

Now that the presidential candidates for the Democratic and Republican parties have been finalized, I would like to take a moment to officially announce The Skeptical Chemist's endorsement of a candidate: Saul Tigh.


Looking at the tough issues that face our nation, I feel that Tigh's experience as a veteran of the Cylon war and leader of the fleet makes him the most qualified candidate. I'm confident that the people will agree and elect Tigh in spite of the main-stream media's libelous attempts to assassinate his character by suggesting that he might be a secret Cylon.

It's always smelly in Philadelphia.

I presented at ACS and all I got was this lousy cold. Well, there was some other stuff too. If you've never been to one, the ACS national meeting consists of thousands of chemists descending on a city to give and attend presentations. More importantly, it's a week of paid vacation in a major city funded through grants where people get to hobnob and peek at their competitors' newest work.

Philadelphia seems like a nice enough city (at least in the heart of the city). The maze of one-way streets was confusing when I tried to drive around and there were spots throughout the area that smelled of raw sewage, but other than that I enjoyed exploring the place.

I presented a poster on my most recent publication in Organometallics this year and everything went smoothly despite the printing SNAFU. I also caught up with Dr. Hepel from Potsdam and found out that she and Dr. Walker will be hosting a regional meeting in 2010. I'll have to go if I'm in the Northeast.

When I wasn't at a meeting session, I was sleeping or eating. I ate at three really good restaurants: Soho Pizza (Market and 2nd), Delilah's (Oprah and Bobby Flay claim that it serves the world's best macaroni and cheese), and Olympic Gyro (Terminal Market). If only there was a place around here where I could get really good pizza, macaroni and cheese, or gyros, I would be so happy. Instead I'm faced with spongy crusts, "world famous" slop (you know who you are), and pre-formed meats. My most adventurous meal was at the Chung King (Arch and 9th). Three of the Chinese students from my group took three of the Americans out for authentic Chinese food instead of that syrupy stuff we usually eat. The menu was almost entirely in Chinese except for unhelpful descriptions of dishes like "chicken." There was also a single page at the back of the menu titled "American Chinese Food" that included anything that Americans would recognize. We ate what was described as dry pot chicken, cumin lamb, hollow stem, and some kind of spicy fish and cabbage dish. They were all delicious and have pretty much ruined American Chinese for for me. At some point, probably while eating the chicken, I accidentally ate what I think was a Szechwan pepper. At first I thought I had eaten lemon grass, but then half of my mouth and tongue went numb. Beef with broccoli never did that! I also ate at one bad restaurant, Crown Chicken. It was late and we were desperate. It reminded me of Cluckin' Bell from Grand Theft Auto. They serve food that only a drunk could love.


Although I didn't get to the Liberty Bell, Constitution [Center/Independence] Hall, or the courthouse [Philadelphia Museum of Art] steps to reenact that scene from Rocky, I did spend a few hours at the Mütter Museum. It was a wonderful collection of medical instruments, wax models and preserved specimens. They had bones showing all manner of injury, deformity, and disease as well as truly horrifying tumors and birth defects. There was even a piece of John Wilkes Booth. If you're at all interested in medicine or history, I would recommend it highly.

While I was riding one of the surprisingly slow ACS shuttle busses, it hit another car and stopped by a blocked street. On that street were a couple of police cars and a large number of onlookers dressed in business suits. Suddenly the people started pointing up at the buildings, people went running across the road and the cars sped around while a cop roped off the road. I got off of the bus to get a better look. It turns out it was a movie shoot. The cars were labelled NYPD and there was a crane and boom operators standing near the center of attention. I've heard of Philadelphia being substituted for New York in movies before. I'm really curious which movie they were filming. I imagine that it is an action/monster/superhero film set in modern New York City.

In this photo you can see the shot being reset. The NYPD cars are being driven back to their starting points near the camera crane under the red lights. The onlookers are in business suits and the cop is collecting the police tape that he'll use to frantically clock off the intersection. More extras will run from the buildings at right, which are the center of attention. City hall is visible in the background.

UPDATE:
There are some much better photos of the movie shoot here. It would seem that it is a Bollywood film being shot by Yash Raj Films (the biggest movie studio in India ). The movie is being directed by Kabir Khan and will star Katrina Kaif, John Ibrahim, and Nitin Mukesh. Sadly, it probably isn't Dhoom 3.

Hot pockets... of oil

I was at the grocery store a while ago and I spotted these Pillsbury Toaster Scrambles Pastries: Cheese, Egg & Bacon. I thought to myself, "Wow! Cheese, eggs and bacon from my toaster. Hell yeah!" The back of the box even proclaims "Real Breakfast! Real easy! Real fast!" How could I go wrong?



There a couple of things to notice about the packaging. First, the package shouts "PASTRIES" in tiny letters under "Scramble" in an oddly passive-aggressive way. Why is this? Did someone in the focus group look at the box and open it only to be horrified that it didn't contain scrambled toasters? Second, the box screams "MADE WITH REAL SCRAMBLED EGGS & BACON" and proudly displays eggs and bacon to drive home the point. But what about cheese? A quick look at the ingredients shows the following:

Enriched flour (...), water, partially hydrogenated soybean and cottonseed oil, soybean oil, palm oil, cooked bacon (...), eggs, cream cheese (...), egg yolk, glycerin, corn starch. Contains 1% or less of salt, sodium caseinate, dry yeast, sodium phosphate, dextrose, cheddar cheese (...), egg white with sodium lauryl sulfate, dried whey, maltodextrin, lactose, nonfat dry milk, lactic acid, modified corn starch, citric acid, titanium dioxide, spice, sodium stearoyl lactylate, autolyzed yeast extract, guar gum, mono and diglycerides, potassium sorbate and TBHQ (preservatives), dipotassium phosphate, xanthan gum, enzyme modified parmesan cheese (...), natural flavor. Colored with yellow 5 and yellow 6.

Cream cheese is the ninth ingredient (not counting the many constituents of flour and bacon) and 1% or less of cheddar cheese. In fact, these little guys contain three times more oil than eggs or cheese. They also contain less cheddar cheese than glycerine or trans-fat. The most interesting ingreedient on the list is sodium lauryl sulfate, which is an emulsifier/foaming agent that suppresses the tongue's sweet receptors and makes orange juice taste nasty after brushing your teeth. I'm all for better living through chemistry, but yuck. Also, sodium caseinate and autolyzed yeast extract are sources of MSG.


But how do they taste? In a word, disappointing. The first bite was pretty good and did taste like bacon and eggs. It reminded me of an Egg McMuffin. However, by the end of each pastry, I was feeling pretty grossed out by the slimy, greasy consistency of the filling. After eating five of these little guys (over five days), I never want to eat another.