Advanced Material Chemistry + Poem = !Warning! May cause brain hemorrhage!

For my Advanced Materials Chemistry course we were assigned to write a poem from a choice of three researches. I wrote mine on Geoff Ozin, Canada Research Chair and University Professor at the University of Toronto.

I tried to maintain an approximation of iambic pentameter, and I think I did a decent job considering how hideously clunky the technical terms are. Seriously, try getting the idea 'nanocomposites created by the combination of organic and inorganic subunits into a hierarchical structure' to fit in the frame of poetry. I dare you. Anyways, here it is.

Paean to a Canada Research Chair

“There's room at the top!” Geoff Ozin exclaims

Not just at the bottom as Feynman once claimed

By building at all scales using tiny blocks

He's given the world a new tool for its box:

This self-assembly has Geoff won great acclaim.

As a fascinating letter to Nature related,

Photonic bandgaps of silicon were created.

By storing information with light.

We'll bid electronics goodnight

In the computing revolution he instigated.

One grand challenge is not enough for this man

Chemical nanomachines are part of his plans

To seek and destroy nasty pollution

Nanobots will whiz around in solution

Or sail on the surface like a catamaran.

His articles make him among the top in citation

Which he can attribute to much innovation.

By ordering units into a hierarchical whole

Over structural properties he's gained much control

With an astounding range of potential applications.

Schrödinger's Blog

I've always believed I publish online so that my writing would be enjoyed by my friends as well as subject to criticism. By writing, I am forced to choose a position and be able to defend it. Unless I write, I will strongly hold beliefs without good reasons, and I find I'm forced to agree with every contrary opinion I come across, which is quite painful.

I've always thought that, so long as I write, I should post it online for others to see. As a result, my blog is like Schrödinger's Cat, except closer to dead than alive. You can visit my page and determine whether my blog is still alive, but one update is no guarantee that others will follow. But after months of not updating, I'll post something and show that it's not really dead.

I don't like the zombie-status of my blog. I've realized that I don't really care that people be able to criticize what I write, because there have only been a few constructive comments from strangers. I'd like my friends to read my blog, but I suspect you're all bored of it. So, my friends, if you're actually still interested in my opinions, let me know and I'll post them online. Until then, I'll be writing for myself.

What? A Blog Post?! About B.C. Elections? Never Mind...

Well, this is my first post of 2009. I expect that you are less interested than the death penalty or the future of my blog than B.C. politics. I'm writing those later so that they appear first.

The provincial elections were on May 12, 2009. I left on April 30, and voting in advance was less of a priority than moving to Mississauga. I'd hoped to vote in support of the electoral system I previously discussed, Single Transferable Vote. I don't want to rehash the details of the system, but I find the politics interesting, and maybe more broadly applicable.

Essentially, STV promises a more proportional and local system to elect politicians. Electoral reform was a campaign promise of the governing party, the Liberals, and the particular system was chosen by a Citizen's Assembly which I believe was chosen to be geographically representative. The vote has failed in two referenda, and I doubt it will be proposed again in 2013.

What puzzles me is why the Liberals promised to reform the electoral system to being with. They haven't always been in power, but they are the dominant party in BC, so they have the most to gain from an unrepresentative system. I have a couple of ideas. One is that districts would have been combined, leading to less representation of rural areas, which tend to favour the opposing party, the NDP. The other is that the Liberals would still dominate under STV, but election results would fluctuate less. If the Liberals feel they can build coalitions more easily than the NDP, they might not lose much power under STV. Finally, they might have just wanted to take this idea away from the NDP, and make it their issue.

Hey! If you skipped over the previous paragraphs that were all blah blah BC blah blah elections, you might as well read this paragraph. What struck me, and led me to write this post, is that I had never considered the Liberals' ulterior motives for reforming the system. But politics is all about spinning ulterior motives into common principles. That doesn't make STV a worse system than FPTP, but it's important not to be deluded.

I hope you enjoy that I am writing again. Now that I work and have free evenings, I have time to think and write, so I expect new posts will appear.

Insomnia, My Old Friend

Although I've always had occasional insomnia, it's been more of a problem recently. Usually, the source of my insomnia is straight-forward: too much caffeine too late in the day, or a late nap that disrupts my sleep schedule. What's unusual about my recent bout of insomnia is that it has directly resulted from my attempt to establish a sleep schedule. By trying to sleep properly, I've actually managed to mess up the dysfunctional schedule I had before.

I haven't had a regular sleep schedule for years. Starting in about 10th grade, I've had more of a cycle than a schedule. I'm naturally inclined to stay up late, but when I had school I had to get up at 7 am on weekdays. Instead of falling asleep at 10 pm and getting sufficient sleep, I would steadily deprive myself of sleep until I was too tired to stay up late, when I would go to bed between 9 and 10 pm, restarting the cycle. I couldn't catch up on my sleep on weekends because I would usually stay up even later and be woken up around 9 am. In summer, I had no weekday restriction on the time I woke up, so I would go to bed any time from 10 pm to 4 am and wake up between 9 am and 3 pm, with no real routine.

Although I wouldn't say that my sleep cycle has been beneficial, it's how I've lived for the past five years, so I must have managed somehow. In high school, I only rarely dozed off in classes, although probably more often than people who managed their sleep habits better. At university, I'm more likely to skip classes than sleep through them, although last year I fell asleep often in phys chem, as it was between organic chem and poli sci. Thankfully, not sleeping regularly hasn't severely affected my life thus far, as I've been happy and done well in school.

At times, I would attempt to fix my sleep schedule by going to bed early each night, but I was never committed enough to actually fall into a routine. Going to bed early might have worked in high school, when I was waking up at 7 am five days a week, but we'll never know whether it would have worked had I seriously tried it. My attempts at university all ended quickly, because I didn't have much of a routine to build off of. One night I would go to bed early and wake up early, while the next night I would go to bed early and wake up late, and on the weekends I would stay up and get up quite late, so there was little chance at my routinely going to bed and waking up early.

My latest attempt at establishing a good routine failed disastrously, but provided some insight into why all of my attempts have failed. At the beginning of the exam period, I decided that I would start going to bed at 10 pm each night and waking up when I felt rested. I reasoned that if I get enough sleep and go to bed at the same time, I'll eventually fall into a natural schedule. Unfortunately, it turns out that if I'm getting too much sleep, I won't be unable to fall asleep at night. Even if I go to bed at 10 pm every day, I won't wake up at 8 am if I fall asleep at 2 am, I'll wake up at 12 pm. Having to wake up for 8:30 am exams has even destroyed the cycle of deprivation and recovery I had before, with a chaotic system of recovering between exams and depriving myself of sleep before them.

That being said, I'm not particularly bothered by insomnia. So long as I've been getting sufficient sleep beforehand, I can lose sleep the night before an exam and still be alert. I've had insomnia often enough to know roughly when I should try and sleep and when I should do other activities until I'm more tired, so it's not like I'm wasting hours upon hours tossing and turning in bed. And most importantly, I know that my recent insomnia is temporary, and that once I've flown home for Christmas I can try sleeping regularly again. Next time around I'll know that waking up early is just as important as going to bed early, and if I don't succeed, at least I won't have to write exams and attend class.

Charts I Heart, Part II

Since I wrote about a graph of baby names yesterday, I decided I had to write about this graph, because it is amazing and awesome. In case you don't read French micro-script, it's a graph showing Napoleon's army size during his Russian Campaign, as he advances on Moscow and then retreats. The numbers on this image are tiny, but a larger version shows that Napoleon left with 422,000 troops and returned with 10,000. The bottom of the graph shows the temperature at various part of the return. If a picture's usually worth a 1000 words, this graph is more like 10,000 words, or at least a textbook chapter. For instance, you can quickly see that Napoleon had lost 275,000 troops before even reaching Moscow, and that he lost a further 140,000 on the return home. There's simply a staggering amount of information contained in this graph, which is why I find it fascinating and had to share it.