Friday Fragments (6/10/11)

Well, it's Friday again! They seem to take forever getting here and yet they fly right by into the weekend.  I posted some interesting links below with some comments per the usual.  But before we dive into the world wide web let me give you a quick glance at how my summer is going.

Did you know...
most standard glass is an amorphous solid.
I'll explain next week!

A month into the summer and I am beginning to progress into to the grad research life.  I just finished a two week course on Pharmaceutical Solids.  The course, however long and monotonous it could have been at times, is quite motivational towards jump starting your own research projects.  Basically, the course consists one hour lectures taught back to back (sometimes up to 7 in a day) by a professor or scientist who is an expert in that particular field.  It is inspiring because all of the lecturers speak of when they were grad students and how they have progressed in their respective careers.  It is a privilege to have been taught by these people and I only hope I can do them justice with my own work.

Speaking of my own work, slow and steady seems to be the way to go.  I have just begun taking small amounts of data for my first study and I am slowly learning the ropes of working in the lab.  Some days it feels like being thrown to wolves because I am told what to do, not always how to do it (such as ordering new Nitrogen tanks).  But, I push aside my pride, ask someone who knows, and I get the job done.  Eventually, I won't feel like the new guy but for now I continue relating this time to that of freshman year of marching band or my first week of RA training.

The Pharmacy Building at Purdue (RHPH)

All in all, life in RHPH is going well.  Next week expect a piece on amorphous solids as that is what the majority of my research will entail  to some degree.  Ok, now for the reason you clicked on the link....here are your time-wasting fragments for today!

-A man from Berlin has been functionally cured of HIV.  It is quite remarkable and undoubtedly will lead to great advances in HIV research but the technique used to cure him was a bone marrow transplant (which can be fatal) and was intended to cure his leukemia, which it did.  The cool thing is that they discovered that the donor is one of the 1% of people in the world who is inherently immune to HIV.  I'll let that sink in for a moment.

-Dinosaurs, Dragons, and Chickens?  A paleontologist wants to create a dinosaur from a chicken by turning on old genes within the chicken DNA.  Thus, he wants to create the chickenosaurus!  And in Malaysia, the skeleton of a rare lizard has been unveiled, which resembles the modern day dragon.  And it is rightfully named the Malaysian Dragon.  Unfortunately, it is just a sculpture made from chicken bones.

-Yes this is a real sign in Indianapolis, Indiana.  It's a sad day to be Hoosier.

One of Intel's Atom Processors and a penny.

-And finally, in computer science news, Intel released news about it's upcoming line of processors.  It plans to defy Moore's law with it's line of Atom processors.  Moore's law basically state's that computing functions improve at an exponential rate over time (i.e. processing speed, memory capacity, chip size, etc).  Intel plans to make the new Atom chips which will improve faster than the predictions of Moore's law.  I don't know whether to be excited, scared, or both.




TGIF!

That's One Expensive Piece of Paper

The graduation season is upon us!  Students across the country have finished school and completed their bouts against “senioritis” in order to walk across a stage or gymnasium for a single piece of paper.  It’s quite ironic that as students we spend countless hours using thousands of pieces of paper to get a single one that is written in calligraphy and has our own name on it.  Before I get too much further I must congratulate a few people who have just graduated and are beginning a new chapter in their lives.

Congrats to the ladies of Pierce Street (Heather and Kristin), friends from res life, and all other 2011 Boilermakers who have just graduated from one of the greatest institutions in the world!  I wish you all nothing but the best and look forward to a brighter future knowing you all will be leading it. College truly is one of the best times in life and I feel privileged to have shared that experience with all of you. I must remind you that even though the door to this part of your life is closing, an even bigger and better door is opening for you all! I must also give a quick shout out to any other college graduates as you have just completed one the biggest steps in your life. (Pharm D pals, your shout out will come next year but best of luck in rotations and I can’t wait to celebrate with you all next May!)

Next, a congrats goes out to my brother, Jacob, and the high school class of 2011.  I attended Jacob’s graduation at my alma mater, Brownsburg High School last week and I must say, it kind of made me feel old.  First, it was my seventh BHS graduation (3 for band, my own, Heather’s, Adam’s, and Jacob’s) and the ceremony itself hasn’t changed, which is a good thing.  The traditional ceremony BHS has is has short and sweet as a graduation with 400+ students can be.  Second, I vividly remember babysitting students in this class.  That’s right, I got paid to put some of you to bed and stay up watching Sportscenter. Now you are all going off to college and being all independent, dang.  Lastly, I only saw a handful of teachers at graduation that I had or even knew.  The turnover in 5 years is extraordinary and if any of my past teachers happen to read this post I hope you know that every little thing you do for your students sticks with us whether we know it or not. 

Now, I am just a year removed from graduating college and still a good 4 years from graduating again, hopefully for the last time.  But I’ll offer a little piece of advice to all those who graduated.  Be thankful!  Thank your parents and your family for supporting you through school (whether it was financially, emotionally, or both).  Thank your friends for sharing the journey with you and making memories you will never forget.  But most of all, thank yourself!  Thank yourself for not giving up when things got tough or for not giving into peer pressure.  Thank yourself for studying and having the courage to try new things.  No one person is solely responsible for their own education, but you are the main benefactor!  That little piece of paper that you get when you walk across the stage (or in the mail later) is the most expensive piece of paper you’ll ever “buy.”  So you should thank the person who got it for you….you!

Alright, now that my emotionally expressive side has finished being all deep I plan to shed some light into a “Summer at School.”  Purdue in the summer is a completely different animal and I hope I can do it justice.  I have also begun a couple projects and even though I can’t go into to much detail I will begin a series of posts outlining some key subjects I will be working in (amorphous solids, solid state chemistry, infrared spectroscopy, etc.) I have also noticed that I have lacked visual aids in my blog lately and that will most definitely change.  Lastly, please check out the Stickyshoereview.com because I will hopefully be writing a guest blog about science movies on there sometime in the near future.

Friday Fragments (5/27/11)

Well it's that time of year...for graduations I mean.  I hope to have an interesting take on graduation ceremonies that I will post shortly (I want to get through my brother's high school graduation that is tonight for completeness).  But until then, here are a few links to keep you busy and get you thinking about....stuff!

-An Australian college student solved a astrophysics mystery as part of a summer internship.  I think that will look pretty good on her resume!  I also think it's crazy that scientists have been searching for this "missing matter" for two decades and it took this girl like 2 months to find it.

-Does God exist?  Well, I'm not here to tell you one way or the other but a scientist by the name of Kurt Godel seemed to give a mathematical proof of God (or more specifically the greatest being imaginable).  It's intriguing and a nice to ponder if you want a good deep thinking session.  Click here for a short summary and click here for the long, much more confusing version.

-Crazy fact of the day...it takes 12.5 million Spam emails to sell $100 worth of viagra!  I just can't imagine how much spam there will be when Viagra goes off patent in 2012!

Hopefully this can be a little pick me up for any of you that are either bored or need some distraction this afternoon!

Same old, same old.

I finished my last final of the semester today.  I'm pretty relaxed about finals nowadays.  Or as relaxed as any sane person can be who has taken final exams for five years and counting. (I do not count high school final exams because they are in no way similar to finals in college.  It's like comparing summer recreational baseball to the MLB.  They are both baseball and that is as close as they get!  The closest a final in high school ever came to a college final was Ms. Hale's AP Chemistry final and even that final would rank in the bottom 2 of the easiest finals I've ever taken in college, but I digress.)

I walked out of my exam room and strolled over to my office in the pharmacy building on campus.  As I walked I felt relieved to be finish with another semester of classes.  Unfortunately it pales to compare to the feeling of last May when I finished my last final of my undergraduate career and felt such a huge sense of accomplishment and excitement.  I urge all of you graduating Seniors, even in high school (yes that means you Jacob) to live in the moment for the next few weeks.  Enjoy every ounce of satisfaction you can from finishing a large chapter in your life.  The next chapters are more exciting but equally more challenging.

As for me, I realized that I had a building safety seminar soon after my last exam.  Then my mind drifted toward getting groceries and cleaning my apartment.  You know, the same old, same old.  Part of me feels disappointed that I do not feel the overwhelming sense of accomplishment as usual.  Part of me knows that in the grand scheme of life, a final exam means about as much as one drop of rain does to the ocean.  I believe this is a good thing, the ability to focus so intensely on something both meaningful and trivial all at the same time can be very gratifying.  So my advice to all this week, enjoy the little things in life, such as finishing finals or enjoying a drink with friends (obviously no alcohol for you pesky high schoolers).

I leave you today with a few interesting tidbits I found this week while procrastinating to study.

First, 40 years of the computer mouse.  Just interesting and fun to see how we how changed technology over the years.

Second, bessel beams?  Yes and they could the tractor beams of the future! (I know completely nerdy, but totally awesome!)

Third, best super soaker ever!

Last, scientists at CERN trapped antimatter for over 17 minutes, which is much, much longer than ever before.  I'm most intrigued by the proposition that antimatter falls up (away from gravity).  Crazy huh?

Presenting Powerpoint

Presentation is everything in today's society.  So naturally, the education system tries to groom the presentation skills of young students from when they are 7 years old through college and beyond. Today, this morning actually, I gave two final project presentations for my graduate level courses (Particle Design and Computational Chemistry) and now that I am finished with the craziness of preparing for said presentations, I thought about how my presentation skills have changed over the years.  More specifically, I realized how different my presentation was from the undergraduates in each course and different from the grad students who are almost finished with their degrees.  So, I am going to attempt to outline the evolution of presentations, with great emphasis on Powerpoint, because only God knows how we would communicate anything without Microsoft's crown jewel application.

Stage One - Your first presentation.

Like taking your first steps or saying your first words, the first oral presentation you give in school is a huge deal.  It usually occurs somewhere in grades 1-3 depending what you consider a presentation.  The earliest "presentation" I remember was a diorama of a Walrus I made from modeling clay.  We had to present our diorama and to tell a little bit about the animal.  Very basic, but I remember my mom writing a few facts on a note-card for me so I wouldn't forget.  Basic but terrifying.  Overall, nothing too elaborate thus it needs no further explanation.

Stage Two - The First Powerpoint.

Not long after teachers get tired of trying to read kids handwriting for assignments they begin to have you type out some assignments in a Word document.  And like the curious kids we all are, we click on the magical orange icon next to word, Powerpoint.  The ability to choose colors, fonts, boxes, shapes, and possibly animations was mesmerizing.  So, every kid found their favorite animal, sport, or food and made a quick slide show.  The backgrounds were usually brightly colored gradients that outlined multiple, non-uniform boxes of crazy looking text.  And the clip-art, what would we do without the little stick figures and smiley faces Microsoft kindly gave everyone.  When I was first introduced to powerpoint, it changed my life and those few friends of mine who spent hours playing Duke Nukem and typing our Christmas lists out for our parents.  Additionally, there should probably be a standard slide for these presentations that reads; "Caution!  Slide Show contains bright colors and irregular shapes.  If you are prone to seizures or are pregnant, please do not watch this presentation!"

Stage Three - The Rules

Sometime in that weird pre-teen stage of school, everyone has at least one teacher who wants you to give a presentation over something quite trivial.  However, the teacher is a quirky control freak and gives you a two-page outline of what the presentation needs to have (usually the outline has a word count that is higher than what is expected for the presentation you have to give).  Here is an example list of rules or how I remember some of the rules.

-Specific Length of Slides (~2 slides longer than you have information for)

-Choice of three fonts (Times New Roman, Times New Roman, or Times New Roman)

-Font Color must be darker than background color

-Background color must be a neutral color (aka white)

-No more than 2 animations per slide

-No more than 2 sentences and 1 picture per slide (what were we suppose to put on the slide)

So it looked like this...

And you never know the ending to any report because of the limitations.  Imagine if Romeo and Juliet ended when they fall in love...how boring?!?

Stage Four - Creative Liability

High school was a time to express yourself.  Thus the universal thing to do was go all out for every presentation.  Posters, visual aids, pictures to pass around, costumes, skits, and powerpoint slide shows with every animation known to man. They were like watching a go-kart race of words and pictures.  And the more advanced the presentation, the better the grade and popularity regardless of content...because if you were good at Powerpoint, you were cool (lol).

Stage Five- Utilizing the Themes (aka Laziness)

College.  The most vivid presentations in my mind are from college.  And they all look the same.  Dress shirt and tie and a themed powerpoint.  Yes, themed.  The lazy way to add a different font, color, and design to an entire presentation.  These were more about content and staying within the time limit for the presentation, which again is always 5-10 minutes less than what you need to adequately meet all the requirements for the project.  Also, themed slide shows allow for groups to make different parts of a presentation and bring them together in one seemless style.  For example...

Stage Six - Regression

Today I realized that grad school will begin my regression stage.  The regression stage is where your presentations become more and more minimalistic.  I believe that as the content becomes more complicated, the slides become more simple.  I have noticed that every grad student and post-doc student presentation looks like they forgot how to use powerpoint and just copied and pasted his presentation from the academic publication they just finished.  And I feel that stage coming because last night as we put the finishing touches on a group presentation, my few sldies were completely redesigned by the 3 undergrads in the project.  Not necessarily a bad thing, I just felt my time was best spent on anything else. Like, golf or watching "The League."

Stage Seven - The Never Ending Presentation

The seventh and finals stage is that of the tenure professor.  These presentations take the minimalistic approach from stage six and create monster slide shows.  Most lectures are 20-30 slides, but once you get past a time frame for teaching a certain subject, you can create slide shows of 50, 75, 100 slides.  The biggest slide show I have ever seen was in high school during an AP Biology field trip.  The speaker spoke about new medical advances in a slide show of over 300 slides.  Wow!  And as if we needed a constant reminder that we were an eternity from finishing the lecture, the slide numbers are placed in the right hand corner.

All and all, every academic will go through these stages in one form or another.  So don't resist and just try to remember what it was like to sit in the audience for all the other boring presentations while you finish your presentations.

Something's Missing

The rain is slowly coming down outside the McDonald's I am sitting in near campus.  As I look out I can't help but feel humbled on the last year of school.  I vividly remember feeling like I was on top of the world about a year ago and even though I have seemingly gone onto bigger and better things, I feel much less significant at times.  I didn't realize how hard it would be going from "the" go-to guy for so many things to someone who's biggest concern is the quiz on Monday in my chemistry class.  My phone use to explode every night, but now it sits on the charger every evening as I read about crystallization and watch basketball.  And the ironic thing is this is what I always wanted.  I always told myself that if I had no other obligations that I could get straight A+'s and be the best friend I could be to everyone. And I justified that part of the sacrifice of being a well-rounded person is being just an A/B student who has to say no to people because of obligations.  In high school I tried to do it all; baseball, intramural sports, marching band, jazz band, any kind of band, academic super bowl, Latin club, AP classes, and have a social life and girlfriend.  It worked and I loved it, but I felt as though I was missing out on somethings because I was so busy.  I am not sure what but something was missing.

In college I gave up band in order to celebrate football games and basketball games as a student.  I still was in a few clubs and eventually became an RA/SR.  That again took up a lot of time and I still kind of wished I had more time to spend with friends and do "college" things while I could.  But now, as a grad student I am expected to devote all my time to school, and I have.  That's what I wanted.  I love to learn and I have found such a cool niche in the world to study.  I really haven't done much other than school this year and I have tried to devote time to friends that I may or may not ever get to spend time with again.  All this as been a humbling experience.  Being busy and needed is hard-wired into the person I am.  And still I feel like something is missing.

Don't get me wrong, things are looking up and I have a lot going for me in my life.  I am a college graduate who has a Fellowship for grad school.  My resume is well-rounded and I feel like I could do anything in this life.  Some days I walk home and think to myself, "I am bound for greatness."  And I believe everyone needs to be a little arrogant at times.  If you don't feel highly about yourself, how is anybody else going to?

I know everybody listens to music and that can be inspirational or just a good way to help express your feelings when you can't find the words.  So the best I can describe how I feel is like the song Something's Missing.  The song, by John Mayer, basically goes through depicting how he has everything he thinks he needs in life but still something is missing.  That's how I feel.  And it is motivational.  If you think you have everything you need in life, what is left to live for?  I have always had that "Somethings Missing" feeling but I was able to suppress it because of all the things I did.  I even thought not being as busy was my missing something.  Now that I have experienced both sides of the spectrum, I have had to face my missing gap head on.  At first it is unnerving and disheartening.  But I have begun to relish the idea and the best thing I do, and I believe everyone should do, is to keep dreaming of something bigger and better to fill your missing gap.  That gap will never fill as long as you keep dreaming bigger.

So take five minutes today and dream big.  I mean really big. I will leave you with an example of mine...

One of my biggest and wildest dreams would be to become one of the first people on Mars, and colonize it.  I would love to be a scientist who lives out the rest of his days on the martian surface.  It is very unlikely that it will ever happen to me, for lots of reasons, but if I am ever even remotely given the opportunity I will be ready to jump all in!  So dream big and relish your missing something!

The Final Exam Theorem (or Postulate)

Wow!  It has been a while since I have written anything new.  I debated shutting down the blog but I really like writing on here.  I wish I could say I was extremely busy, but it actuality that's not the whole story.  Between this semester being nothing more than taking classes and reading literature, and a personal life which has been anything but smooth, finding the time and desire to write interesting stuff has been tough as of late.  However, I have been getting my ducks in a row and I really want to keep this thing going.  (Also, a couple friends of mine have rejuvenated their blogs and I felt inclined to follow suit.  Check them out; Mildly Competent and The Pit.)

Here at Purdue, finals are almost upon us again.  The air is warm, the trees are in bloom, I want to play golf instead of spending hours studying.  This leads me to my first theorem of my graduate career.  I present to you the "Final Exam Grade Theorem."  Now before I get to the carefully derived equation let me explain to you the inspiration behind it.  I felt that the amount of time spent studying can be correlated to your exam score but that as the more you study the less of an increase in you score (not a decrease in your score but a decrease in the amount you can improve your score).  With that in mind here is the equation...

Where EG=Final Exam Grade (out of 100), GPA=Your Cumulative GPA (or what kind of student are you; A student=4.0, B student=3.0, etc), A=attendance rate where 1 is attend all classes and 0 is attend no classes, and t=time spent studying for the final in hours.  Below is a graph of various degrees of GPA and Attendance rates.  It is quite interesting considering a 4.0 student who attends every class needs to study for about 4-5 hours to get a perfect score, compared to the 3.0 student who went to class with him/her who needs to study for 17-18 hours, and their poor 2.0 friend who went to every class with them but still needs to study for 37 hours.  

Now for my assumptions.  I am assuming that a 4.0 student who attends every class can get an 80 percent on the final if they study 0 hours.  And I honestly believe that if you go to every class and pay attention, do the homework and assignments, you can study nothing at all and get at least a C on the final (a genius 4.0 student should be able to do better than that, so I set that at 80).  Next, the attendance rate.  I used the 1/e^(1-A) because it if you attend every class (A=1.0) then it is directly related to how well you have done in school before (GPA).  But as you stop going to class it decreases in an exponential fashion.  At A=0 however, I did not want it to completely eliminate the GPA term, thus the e term to only fractionly decrease your base score. 

Lastly, the time spent studying term. I used my own experiences, GPA, and attendance rates to come up with the constant of 98.7.  And the square root comes from the idea that the more you study, the less of a change in your grade it will make. Overall, I have realized through explaining my theorem, that it is anything but a theorem and more of a postulate at this point.  Meaning it needs to be proven.  I would love to collect data from people and try and formulate a better equation that includes difficulty of the class, pre-requisites taken, and year in school (freshman, soph, etc).

Since I have either throughly confused you, annoyed you, or intrigued you, I ask for you to stew it over and plug in your own numbers to see where you stand.  If it is reasonable, great.  If not, sorry about luck. After I formulated the equation I tried it on my sophomore Physics class as it was my first all-nighter for an exam.  I had a GPA of 3.7 at the time, I went to almost all the classes (A=0.9).  With that, I remember having a 12 hour turn around between finals before my physics final.  I stayed up all night and got a 95% on the exam (I needed that score to get an A in the class, hence the motivation).  If you plug in the numbers to the EG equation it gives about 8 hours of studying to reach the grade of 95%.  If you assume that I ate two meals, and took breaks with my all-nighter that's about 8-9 hours.  Not too bad!