Stir-fried random…

Just a few brief random comments for the moment:

  • Am I the only one who is already completely sick and tired of the word “spooky”?
  • I think I’ve figured out what Descartes’ problem is. He’s gone on this meditation where he’s convinced himself that as far as he knows, nothing exists…except for himself. I think what happens next is that he gets horribly lonely, so when he realizes that his thoughts also exist with him, that’s when he developed that unwholesome passion for them and inability to bear leaving them that I’d previously mentioned. “But what kind of thing am I? I’m a thing that thinks. A thinking thing is what I am. But what kind of thing is that? Oh, yeah, I already said, it’s a thinking thing. Did I mention I was a thinking thing that thinks thoughts?….”. Okay, Descartes, we got it the first time…
  • One of my fellow “college science bloggers whose obscurity currently keeps them low in the vote totals” actually has a pretty neat blog. The Biourbanist focusses on features and attributes of urban areas. Well worth adding to your RSS feeds, I think. After you’ve already voted for me, of course…
  • I am currently attempting to put together my first netcast, in which I shall attempt to crunch an explanation of why microbial fuel cells work, in a form hopefully comprehensible to anyone with a good junior-high-school science education (or a mediocre high-school education, which is probably sadly more common), that fits into 90 seconds. Wish me luck.

More to follow…
UPDATE: Got the “pod”/netcast done – a real blog post on the subject of Microbial Fuel Cells to go with it may be found here tomorrow (Tuesday, October 16th) sometime, so long as nothing unexpected happens…

“Dog Philosophy”

But first, a quick request for information for anyone who happens by: where you live, what is the job market like for Ph.D. Geologists (with a background in stratigraphy, mining, and petroleum, among other things) and what kind of opportunities for non-medical biotechnology graduate programs are in your local colleges?

(And a quick side-question: is it obvious to most people that you get extra information if you hover over or click on things that look like this? I’ve never formally checked the usability of this trick for normal people…)

No login required to answer – they’ll appear as soon as I’ve filtered out any spam. Okay, on with the meat of this post.

In case anyone’s wondering what the “Epicanis” handle is all about: it’s a pun on the concept of “Dog Philosophy”, based on the name of the famous Greek philosopher “Epicurus” and the word “Canis”. Yes, I know, “Canis” is Latin, not Greek, but I figured “Epicanis” would be more a more recognizeable pun to most people than “Epicynus”.

Properly defining “Dog Philosophy” involves a joke which necessarily incorporates mild profanity and adult situations. In case any of the readers are of more delicate sensibilities, I present instead a more matter-of-fact (but sadly less funny) version.

Plato once famously wrote that dogs were philosophers. Like all philosophers that I know of, dogs consider the nature of what is real (metaphysics). To the dog, everything that exists external to the dog can be assigned to one of four categories:

  • Food
  • Toys
  • Companions
  • and

  • Everything Else, which is generally useless except as a surface for territory marking

You may wonder what that has to do with “Applied Empirical Naturalism” or science blogging.

The explanation is simple: science is fundamentally a method for examining the natural world to determine how and why it works. That’s what I like about science. One can find novel or unexpected applications of any system or thing by learning how and why they work, or in other words, it’s a method for, among other things, taking things from the “useless” category to one of the “useful” categories. Finding ways to make otherwise-useless things beneficially useful for people strikes me as a particularly rewarding purpose in life.

In addition to wanting to make the world a better place, I’m also kind to puppies and kittens and I think people should be nicer to one another.

(This shameless display of sympathy-solicitation has been brought to you by my participation in the following competition:)

Going to have to re-examine Socrates…

Figuratively speaking, of course, since he’s dead and all…

Man, Descartes so far is a serious disappointment. He seems to have an almost Dickensian tendency to verbal puffery (though thankfully the Descartes “Meditations” are much smaller than the big sack of tedium that was “David Copperfield”). It’s like he’s developed an unwholesome lust for his own thoughts and can’t keep his metaphysical hands off of them.

You’d think a guy clever enough to come up with “The Cogito™” could do better.

When I heard Descartes described years ago, I’d heard he started with “I think, therefore I am” and then from there proved the existence of The Supreme Being somehow. While I didn’t expect an unquestionable Proof, I did at least expect to see some spectacular theological philosophy taking place.

Instead, I (metaphorically, of course) show up at Descartes’ intellectual feast expecting some unique and exotic fare, only to see Descartes rummage around in his kitchen to come up with an old, freezer-burnt old package of leftover AquinasAnselm (oops), which he spottily defrosts in the consumer-grade-microwave of his argument. Bah. Not even worthy of dirtying my mental spork on. (There, do I sound arrogant enough to be an old-school philosopher myself yet?)

In other news: Celebration time! I’ve advanced all the way from 1st loser to 3rd loser! WOOHOO! It’s a bit of a jump to get up to the next tier (blogs getting an average of around 50-100 votes/day) but I can make it…

Calling on the entire internet to study for a Philosophy exam…

I’ll probably do two posts today, but only because this one is a preview and an attempt to gather opinions…

I find writing helps me think, and we’ve got a Philosophy exam day after tomorrow. We’ve got a “study sheet” with eight concepts and fourteen potential essay questions that might come up on the exam. Is anyone reading this particularly interested in any of these (some of these have been addressed in earlier posts, but here’s the whole list)?

Concepts: “valid argument”, “sound argument”, “a priori knowledge”, “a posteriori knowledge”, “epistemology”, “metaphysics”, “doctrine of recollection”, “Objective reality/formal reality”

Essay topics (in short):

  • Describing the “Socratic Method” and contrasting it with the sophist method.
  • Discuss some of the Socratic philosophical positions that might call into question the view that what is right for a person is whatever that person believes is right.
  • Discuss Socrates’ claims that evil harms the evildoer and that “the unexamined life is not worth living”, and whether or not he’s justified in these claims
  • Critically discuss Socrates’ claim (at his trial) that he could not have been knowingly and willingly corrupting the youth
  • Discuss Socrates’ arguments in the “Apology” that death is not something to be feared
  • Discuss the “Learner’s Paradox” in the “Meno” (roughly – is it possible to “learn” something without being “taught”, and if so, how can this be?)
  • What was the point of the “slave boy” portion of the “Meno” (Socrates’ attempts to demonstrate that someone who doesn’t understand Geometry can come to have knowledge of geometry without being taught.)
  • Discuss Meno’s definition of “virtue” and Socrates’ objection to it
  • Discuss the distinction (in the “Meno”) between “true knowledge” and “opinion”, and how it relates to the question of whether virtue can be taught
  • From “Euthyphro”, discuss the issues around whether or not whether something is “pious” because The Gods love it, or if The Gods love it because it is “pious”.
  • State clearly and describe Descartes’ three levels of doubt
  • Discuss Descartes’ contention in the first Meditation that he cannot know if he is not dreaming
  • Discuss The Cogito (“I think, therefore I am” and why Descrates couldn’t instead say (for example) “I walk, therefore I am”
  • Discuss: “I hear a noise, I feel heat. These things are false since I am asleep. Yet I certainly do seem to see, hear, and feel warmth. This cannot be false.” (A quote from our translation of Descartes’…)

That’s what we’ve been given to work with. What are the odds that any of that is interesting to any of you? If so, please comment (no login required, and go ahead and put a fake email address in the comment form if it bothers you – as long as it doesn’t appear to be spam I’ll post it.). Come on, you’ll be doing me a favor, and you’ll automatically sound like a genius because we’re discussing philosophy.

Followup post later today…

I’m an interdisciplinary nerd…

Oh woe! Oh woe! Last time I checked, I was dead last on the College Scholarship Blogging Competition! Now, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I may be a cynic but I’m an optimistic cynic, and therefore think that surely if I apply my full mighty nerd powers, I can figure out what’s wrong and fix it.

First, what is going wrong? I thought for a while, and came up with a few possibilities:

  • God Hates Me
  • God Loves Me And Wants Me To Win, But Doesn’t Exist And Therefore This Does Me No Good
  • The divine is not involved, but there is a conspiracy against me involving the CIA, the NSA, the BATF, The Teamsters, the Freemasons, and the World Aquaculture Society.
  • Blatant Age Discrimination by a bunch of dang whippersnappers (Git offa my lawn!)
  • Dang Yankees
  • Perhaps my young and under-promoted blog is simply still too obscure and not well enough established to have the large number of connections that older and better-promoted blogs have, and this is just a natural result of more popular blogs being able to get their “vote for me” message out to more people, who in normal human fashion will vote for the blog with which they are most familiar.
  • (Hey, I was brainstorming, so even crazy ideas like this were considered…)
    Then, finally, the problem became obvious to me:

  • It’s too much work to vote for me

It’s so obvious now! Hordes of adoring fans are coming out of the metaphorical woodwork and going to vote for me, but are becoming exhausted and collapsing before they manage to find my name, buried near the bottom of the list of 20 different blogs!

You may not realize this, but I’m back in college because I’m trying to start my life over. I may be microbial biotechnology nerd now, but in my former life, I was a professional computer nerd for 15 years. My amazing nerd powers are therefore being applied to solve this problem (see also the update at the end of this post):

There – one click on the image (aw, look, Cornelia wants you to vote for me!), click the confirm button that pops up, and you’ve voted for me. Problem solved. When clicked and confirmed, a new window should open and you should see the current standings. If you are presented instead with an unselected voting form, it didn’t work – let me know. Now go! Go, my fellow conspirators! Click us to victory!

But seriously – I may yet come up with a way to gain enough fame quickly enough to have a shot at the prize, but right now I’m in last friggin’ place…which means I’m free! I don’t have to worry at all about “oh, gosh, if I do that will I lose the crucial vote that loses me first place?!?!?” and I can pretty much do whatever I want, within the bounds of ethics and legality, and it’ll make no difference. Therefore, I want to point something out:

Down at the bottom of this post, you’ll see that this material is made available under a Creative Commons license. Basically, as long as you’re not a commercial venture and you give me credit, you’re allowed to take and use anything you like from here, including taking and remixing the one-click-vote thing there. And, yes, this explicitly applies to my competition (Money or no money, I really can’t imagine how a scholarship competition counts as “commercial”.)

I’ll even go one step further: if any of you other finalists happen to see this and would like to use this on your own blog, let me know and I’ll send you a version tweaked to vote for you blog instead of mine. I’ll even try to help you get it inserted into your blog if you’d like. All I ask is that you mention and link to my blog somewhere in one of your posts. Obviously I’d prefer something complimentary, but if you feel the urge to write “I hear that Sean at The Big Room rapes puppies, eats babies, and has an unnatural attraction for maple trees”, what the heck, as long as there’s a link…

What do you think? Good idea? Bad idea?
UPDATE: Dangit, I swear it looked like it was working yesterday, but the ‘one-click’ (plus confirmation) thing is unexplainably just not getting the vote in, though everything else was working correctly. For the moment, I’ve reverted to having the link bring up the official vote form in a separate window…

The offer to make it available to others still stands, however, if anyone’s interested. I’ll re-revise this post if I figure out how to get it working.

Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Park

Here’s a brief interlude for my new readers. Members of my immediate family have seen this before elsewhere, but what the heck, I may as well share with you all.

Related to my recent posts about this year’s field-trip to Yellowstone National Park, I am reminded of a trip my wife and I took last year to Norris Geyser Basin in the same park.

I’ve heard of “communing with nature”, when the natural world seems to speak to you and put you at ease. Well, on this occasion it didn’t just seem to be speaking to me, and it hardly put me at ease. The conversation between me and the park went something like as follows that day. (Forgive all the scrolling, it WAS a several-hour conversation after all. If it bugs you, feel free to say so in the comments…)

Sign:No Restroom in Geyser Basin

Well, okay, I don’t smoke, I didn’t bring a bicycle, we left the dog at home. And I guess we can hold it until later. It’s a small price to pay to go out to nice, happy, peaceful trails, away from, for example, all the annoying road construction.Traffic cone, in the middle of the trailWow! Look at that! Do I spy the Fruiting Body of the rare Yellowstone Giant Orange Holewarning Mushroom?!?!?No, wait…that’s just a traffic cone over a hole in the trail! What the heck? I thought I was getting away from road construction!

Well. Maybe things will get more natural-looking once we get a chance to walk off into the wilderness. Maybe the map’ll show where we can go.

Map of Norris Geyser Basin, with Warning to Stay On Designated Trails
Ah, look at all the lovely trails. Plenty of space to roam around in.
What? I can’t leave the trails?
sign:Stay On Designated Trails

Can’t I take a mere step or two off? Just a little bit???

Sign:Stay on TrailSign:Stay On WalkYeah, yeah, whatever. What are you going to do if I don’t – have me arrested?

 

Sign:Unlawful to Leave Walkway
What kind of criminal act could possibly be involved with just leaving the silly walkway? Littering? Vandalism?
Sign:It is UNLAWFUL and UNSAFE to: Leave the walkway in thermal areas or throw objects into or deface thermal features

Oh, come on! Look, there’s a beautiful green pool over there, full of no doubt fascinating little animalcules. Can’t I just go over and take a little look?

Sign:Keep Off - Thermal Area
“Thermal Area”? What the heck is that supposed to mean? It’s a little windy and chilly today, maybe I want to be warmed up a little. So, why not? What’s so bad about a “Thermal” area?

Sign:Hazardous Ground - Thin Crust - Boiling Water

What’s that supposed to mean?

 

Sign:Dangerous Ground -with illustration of kid falling into ground and getting broiled-
Children are prone to explode out of the ground unexpectedly?Walkway shown crossing the top of the steaming opening of Green Dragon SpringWhat the heck? Is Green Dragon Spring actually devouring the ground under that walkway?!?! Oh! I get it – you’re saying the park itself can swallow you up and and cook you?
So everything here is flaming hot death, then, right?

Sign:Warning: Trail My Be Icy

Is there no end to the dangers this place threatens innocent visitors with? Can there possibly be anything else this park can do to us?!?!?

 

Solfatara: Very Dangerous Landscape spewing Sulfuric Acid Gas!
“Thin Crust”? “Boiling Water”? Broiled flesh cooked in acid? Ice?
Is this a park, or the kitchen at a Chinese restaurant? Is this how “Hot and Sour Soup” is made?!?!? Is there nothing that can stand in this realm of violent burning chemical death without fear!?!?!?
Fearless Geyser

But what of us poor, fragile fleshy people? We aren’t safe here!That does it! I’m getting out of here! No more of these horrible Killer Thermal Death Areas of Doom for me! I think maybe I’ll just go look at the nice cuddly animals that Yellowstone is also famous for.
Sign: Caution - Wild Animals are Unpredictable and Dangerous!
This whole friggin’ place wants to gore, dismember, maul, cook, devour, and digest me! That does it. No more of this dangerous stuff for me – I think I’ll just go read a nice book for a while…
Bookstore:Closed
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooo!!!!!!

If I Win It…

One topic that I have hoped to emphasize much more on this blog is amateur science, and in particular (given my educational background) amateur Microbiology.

Don’t be dissuaded by my use of the word “amateur” here. I don’t mean “not really” science (i.e. the microbiological equivalent of the “baking soda volcano”). Rather, here I’m using “amateur” in its proper etymological sense – science done for the love of it. I don’t just mean my brief series of experiments on the toxicology of expired JellO®. I mean actual microbiology with potential practical application as well as educational value. Unfortunately, there are a few bits of equipment for this that I can’t reasonably cobble together out of spare parts or repurposed household appliances. A microscope, for instance. Or a dry-ice maker.

Being a full-time college student, I’m poor, and can’t afford a microscope. A decent ordinary “brightfield” microscope appears to cost about $400. Bonus materials like a “darkfield” condensor are extra, unless I think I can rig up an equivalent on my own. A nicer digital camera to take pictures with to share with you, my loyal reader(s) would add some more to the cost. Even in the case of equipment and supplies improvised from more ordinary and readily-available materials (pressure-cooker=”autoclave”), there is still a cost. Woe unto me, what shall I do?!?!?

For the moment, I shall revert to the time-honored traditions of “begging” and “hoping”…

You see, there appears to be a scholarship available for bloggers who are full-time college students. Why, what a coincidence! I blog…and I’m a full-time college student! What luck!

There appears to be a US$10,000 (that’s almost 10000 CANADIAN dollars!). It’s not explicitly stated but last year they also had $1,000 “runner-up” awards as well. Here, then, is my pledge to you all.

Should I be selected as a finalist for this scholarship competition, I will eat 2-year-old JellO! Furthermore, if I were to actually be selected to win a $1000 scholarship, I will buy a real microscope and be able to blog my microbiology experiments and studies much more vividly. I will also blog the design and construction of my own amateur microbiology lab, to the extent that I can afford. (Well, I was ALSO going to do this anyway, but with a scholarship I’d actually be able to start doing it…)

Were I to be selected to win the full $10,000 scholarship I propose to go absolutely Nucking Futs, with a microscope, a nice new digital camera, dry-ice maker and plenty of CO2, perhaps some dedicated hosting for this blog, and a complete collection of useful microbiology equipment (mostly improvised still, but that’s half of the education right there…). Furthermore, should my readers demand it, I might even be persuaded to drink a cup of fresh Lysogeny Broth!

Come on, who needs this money and attention more – me, or some wealthy (compared to me) graduate student over on scienceblogs.com? I bet none of them would eat 2-year-old JellO or drink E.coli Chow for it, would they?

10 Finalists are to be announced October 7th, from what I understand…wish me [good] luck…
UPDATE: I made the finals, though my fame doesn’t seem to be carrying along a rose-petal-strewn path to victory yet…

Expired JellO®! Flee! FLEE FOR YOUR LIVES!!!!

Expired JellO®! Deadly Poison, or Merely Debilitating? Can a human being withstand the toxic load of an *entire box* of it? Would he suffer embarassingly loud and messy gastrointestinal distress, or would immediate organ failure set in before this could take place? STAY TUNED TO FIND OUT!…

Yes, loyal readers, as I type this I have subjected my own body to unthinkable risks to answer these very questions. That, dear readers, is how much I care about your health and welfare. You can thank me later…

If I survive!

What does it mean to be an “Applied Empirical Naturalist”, anyway? As a naturalist, I look for natural explanations for natural observations. If I survive this ordeal, I will not explain it as being due to protection by supernatural forces, and conversely if I end up confined to an intensive care unit, my body ravaged by Expired-Gelatin-Syndrome, I will not seek to explain it as divine punishment for violating Kosher. As an Empirical naturalist, I investigate things by actual observation and direct testing wherever possible, rather than purely philosophical means. And – particularly important to me – Applied Empirical Naturalism is intended to convey that I am primarily interested in investigations with practical uses. Discovering the “Pineapple-Upside-Down Quark” with an umpty-brazillion-dollar particle accelerator and six months of supercomputer time to crunch the data wouldn’t do me, personally, much good. Knowing whether expired JellO® is safe to eat or not, however, has obvious practical application. Especially considering that I seem to have about 5 more boxes of the stuff in the pantry.

So, here I sit, perhaps writing my very last words ever before Expired-Gelatin-Shock causes my brains to swell up and explode messily and fatally from my ears like the popping of two superintelligent zits, in the service of Science. Here, then, is my story.

I begin by building my dire experiment around the following excessively-formal Valid Argument:

Upon expiration, JellO® becomes a deadly poison which causes great harm to those who dare ingest it
I prepare and consume an entire box of expired JellO®
Therefore, I suffer great harm due to its ingestion.

Last night, I plucked from the depths of my pantry an expired-2½-years-ago box of sugarless orange-flavored gelatin with which to begin this investigation. I blew the layer of dust off of the box, and carefully opened it, half-expecting to find some strange mutant gelatin-beast had developed in it over the years since expiration. One hand poised to protect myself should the creature leap from the box to eat my face in anger of being disturbed, I was both relieved and slightly disappointed to find nothing more than a foil packet containing what sounded like perfectly ordinary gelatin-powder. The packet proved to be intact, and the happy orange powder poured into a freshly-cleaned dish in a manner perfectly imitating that of wholesome non-expired gelatin. I dismissed the faint demonic snickering sound I seemed to hear as a figment of my fevered imagination and prepared the gelatin powder in the usual manner.

I took up my electric kettle, containing distilled water, and threw the switch. Seconds passed into minutes. Minutes passed into more minutes. Then, the water began boiling vigorously, and I applied one cup (8 fluid ounces) of this to the dish of powder, stirring it with a tablespoon. It seemed to take at least two minutes of continuous stirring, but the deceptively innocent-looking powder finally dissolved without the slightest scent of brimstone. As prescribed by the instructions on the box, I added a further 8 fluid ounces of cold water (from the tap of my kitchen sink), stirred briefly to mix, and placed the dish in the refrigerator to gel overnight.

I lay awake in bed for hours, wondering if I was doing the right thing. Was I insane? Did I not remember the tales of Jeckyll and Hyde? Of Doctor Frankenstein? Of Pons and Fleischman? What horrible fate was I setting myself up for? Finally, I dropped into a fitful slumber, disturbed only by dreams of amorphous orange demons stalking me to feast upon my soul…

Day broke, and this very afternoon I took the now solidified mass from the refrigerator. This was it. My last chance to avoid whatever hellish abuses this disturbingly orange substance had planned for me. But no…it was far too late to turn back now. I took up my spoon, and devoured every last bit of happy orange jiggliness.

This was approximately seven hours ago. In the intervening time, I have experienced the following symptoms: Occasional thirst, mild generalized anxiety about the near future, hunger, and an urge to write this blog post in a hyperbolic language more suited to an H.P. Lovecraft story than a scientific report. In other words…I appear to have been entirely unaffected, despite consuming an entire box of expired gelatin.

I’ve been taught that when hypothesis-testing, one considers the “null hypothesis”. That is, the hypothesis that would falsify the one that I’m starting with. In this case, it would be something to the effect of “I will suffer no harm whatsoever from eating expired JellO®”. Given the results in this experiment I must – in the tortured language of philosophical science – “fail to reject the null hypothesis”, because my results show no evidence whatsoever that I have suffered harm from eating expired gelatin. In other words, I cannot rationally cling to my original hypothesis as written, and must confess that perhaps expired instant gelatin still in intact packaging may, in fact, be harmless.

Ah, but I know what happens now. “Cad!”, you cry! “Fraud! Sham! This experiment is, like, totally bogus! This is not normal JellO® but a sugar-free impostor! And furthermore, this isn’t even JellO®-brand gelatin, but a cheap knock-off brand! How dare you, sir, feed us this crap, which proves nothing!”

I answer in two parts: Firstly, ladies and gentlemen who are my readers, I assure you that the contents of the less-famous brand and the official Kraft® Foods brand are essentially identical, and indeed, might conceivably have come from the same source. It’s common practice for one factory’s product to be shipped to multiple sellers who each offer it under their own label, as the wide variety of affected brands during the recent “salmonella peanut butter” scare demonstrated. And secondly: as it happens, I also have in my possession a box of JellO®-brand lime-flavored gelatin, WITH sugar, which although it lists no obvious “expiration date”, has a code stamped on the box indicating that it was originally packaged in late 2003, and therefore should have exceeded the expected 24-month shelf-life about the same time as today’s test subject did. I swear to you, dear readers, that I will repeat my experiment with this sample next.

Stay tuned: “Expired JellO II: Lime’s Revenge”, coming soon to a blog near you!

UPDATE: The Expired JellO® Saga continues here!

Okay, this is completely bogus…

The folks over at BBspot are callously spreading microbiological misinformation (click for full-size):

This is just plain irresponsible and utterly wrong. Surely everyone can see the obvious problem here, right?

When this happens, the flame is blue, not orange.

Uh, or so I’ve heard.

(If it isn’t obvious – what you do in this situation is calmly take the spreader out and set it on your nice, flameproof benchtop, and set something non-fragile and non-flammable on top of the flaming jar of alcohol, which will then go out quickly as the oxygen gets used up. All the labs I’ve been in lately use “canning” jars for the alcohol in this application, complete with lids which can be set on top to extinguish the flame.)