Uighurs

How did we become such a nation of cowardly shits that the idea of admitting and resettling a handful of members of an oppressed ethnic group, whom we mistakenly imprisoned for five years in harsh conditions, causes such a ruckus. I have to think that the recent studies on the connection between right wing politics and brains wired for fearfulness are on to something.

Chemistry

Why on earth do they teach chemistry in high school? Biology I get: it's everywhere we look and it's fascinating - all this from such simple origins. Physics too (natch). What could be more interesting than learning about how the universe and everything in it work? All those weird forces - the ones we take for granted intuitively, like the resistance of a solid object or the pull of gravity, and the more mysterious ones, like magnetism. And it's all essential for understanding technology as engineering rather than magic.

But what's the deal with chemistry? Couldn't they just spend two weeks talking about acids & bases and be done with it? What's the point to learning about stoichiometry, solubility constants (whose unmotivated definition is pretty strange), electronegativity, cations and all that other arcana? It really seems like a bunch of obscure and pointless stuff for anyone not planning on a career in chemistry. Yeah, OK, it's pretty important for doing biology. But really, anyone going on in biology is going to have to learn all this stuff over again in college, because it's being taught at such a low level in HS. It just doesn't seem important to creating a "well rounded citizen" able to function and contribute in society.

I really get the feeling that it's there for historical reasons. Kind of like the year-long course in geometry in the math sequence.

Here at the end

Not much else to say...

Back roads of Hadley

Between Leverett and Northampton is Hadley, mostly flat farm country along the eastern floodplain of the Connecticut river. The straightest and widest road through Hadley is route 9, but since the late '60s it's gradually been filled in with a successions of malls and traffic lights. So the fastest route is not along the 4 lane roads. The fast route from Leverett to Northampton is along North Amherst back roads to route 47, then through the Hadley farms, dropping into route 9 right at the Coolidge Bridge. It's very dark at night, and there's one bend in the road that I managed to miss last nght. I ended up on a dirt road through the corn, right on the banks of the Connecticut. It felt very remote, even though I was just a few hundred yards from the bright lights.

Death

Watching my mother die is more difficult than I had imagined, even accounting for the fact that I expected it to be more difficult than I imagined. I get rushes of emotion at random times, talking to nurses, doctors and social workers. It's completely uncontrollable when it happens.

Why do we cry? A quick google search is unenlightening. The top hit is a page of pseudo-scientific BS about how tears rid the body of some hormone and mineral that make us depressed. My suspicion is that it's a social thing - a cue to whoever we're with that we need comfort and gentle handling. Like Ekman's micro-expressions, only macro.

Death is ugly, even when it's peaceful. My mother is really dying of starvation now. She stopped eating a while ago, and just sips water through a straw. Her eyes are closed most of the time, though she's half awake.

I watched a close friend die of cancer last year loaded to the gills with morphine at the end. The current practice of pain management is clearly the humane thing to do, but the narcotics involved leave the patient confused, if not comatose, robbing the family and friends of contact during the last stages. I haven't seen this aspect of end-stage treatment mentioned in all the discussions about palliative care. Maybe it shouldn't be - it's a little selfish to want someone to be alert and uncomfortable rather than peaceful and asleep. But I can't help it. I want contact.

PS...
I think an unspoken aspect of the use of heavy doses of narcotics is their side effect of suppressing the breathing reflex. In an already weakened body, this can't help but hasten things along. Not that that's a bad thing... I hope when my time comes I'll get the heavy dose of morphine too. Or maybe just a pillow over the face. It would be more merciful than what I'm witnessing at the moment.

Or maybe I'm wrong about all of this: the dying person would be just as sleepy, confused and disconnected without the narcotics, but also in pain.

Free for the summer

Contract work comes to an end next week, so it looks like I'm free for the summer again. It was great last time - strolling to Monterey market, cooking, having coffee on Solano, walking in the hills... Life as it was meant to be lived. (Aside from the minor matter of tracking down my next gig.)

Taking the Physics CSET

I've been thinking of moving on to a "next" career. This would be my third, if grad school and a brief postdoc count. My thought: high school physics teacher. I still read Physics Today as soon as it arrives, and whenever I find a good survey article on arxiv.org I read it. It's still a subject that animates me... Sam's newfound interest in physics helped to get me thinking in this direction too. (My last career, as a strategist and researcher for a hedge fund, turns out to have been spectacularly mis-timed, aside from misjudging the character of the person who hired me.) The timing of this one is probably questionable as well - the California propositions that would keep funding for schools from diving off a cliff look set to go down in flames next week, and the Governator promises deep cuts in pretty much everything as a result.

Anyway, one of the many hoops the state makes you jump through before you can be considered qualified to earn a pathetically small salary teaching the next generation is a "subject matter test" to certify your competency in the field you want to teach. (This is the least of the hoops - the bigger ones include a year or so of coursework and internship time.) So on Saturday I took the Physics CSET.

This consisted of 50 multiple choice questions plus 3 "structured response" questions where you have to write out your answer (and some poor shlub has to grade it). Most of the questions were pretty simple material that anyone who got a passing grade in college freshman mechanics and E&M could have answered (though some of the questions had distractors, like giving the mass of a pendulum bob in a problem to calculate the length of the wire required to get a specified period). Two questions jumped out at me, though - one E&M problem where I'm practically certain none of the offered answers were correct: they all had the wrong sign - and one on, of all things, the strong interaction!

I have no idea why this was in there - my first thought was that there must be some generality in the state standard about being able to describe the "four forces", but I couldn't find anything like that in the curriculum on the state website. The question basically asked which of four metaphoric descriptions was the best description of how the strong force works. Three of them were:
* It's like wet sand where the water makes the sand grains stick together
* It's like a series of filters with openings of different sizes [I have no clue what this is supposed to mean]
* It's like two people on a skating ring tossing a bowling ball back and forth
I can't remember the fourth. I think they were after the third - at least that's what I marked - but the first probably makes about as much sense, and none of them really are useful as metaphors (compared to, say, the metaphor of electric and magnetic "lines of force" which is so useful that people tend to think of them as real). The third one is something you sometimes hear in discussions of how forces arise from "virtual particles" (another metaphor), but it has the problem that it's very hard to understand how two opposite charges passing virtual photons back & forth can get pulled towards each other. The normal intuition from this picture would be that the momentum transfer will push them apart. There's a long discussion on the usenet Physics FAQ about this, but it's not at all straightforward. The whole point of metaphors in physics is to clarify for our intuitions the key features of the phenomenon. This one gets it exactly wrong.

One more oddity from the test. You can take more than one at the same sitting. But you get the same total time for one, two or three tests - up to five hours. I imagine that this is supposed to be "more than enough" even for three. I had writer's cramp after just the one. Then again, as the Firstborn never tires of reminding me, I'm old.

Update: I passed. But I'll never know if the bowling ball metaphor was what they were after...