archaeology of blogging

To my huge surprise, I've just discovered that the first incarnation of my blog (apart from the very first one on MySpace), which was hosted on the Yahoo360 / geocities network of sites has survived the demise of both yahoo360 and geocities. Apparently, blog entries have been moved, along with my website, to the new yahoo domain michaelgross.info.

I usually refer to it as the "red top" version of my blog, it ran from 10.5.2006 to 14.5.2008, with 503 entries, and the complete list of entries is here:

Prose and passion: the red-top version

So if any of my seven faithful readers should ever want to look up a vaguely remembered blog entry from the time before blogspot (i.e. older than summer 2007), that's where to find it. Please ignore the pedestrian design, though ...

PS one entry I just re-read is:

three reasons not to eat your partner

responsibility of chemists

This time of the year, 25 years ago, I was a first term chemistry student, and one morning our inorg. chemistry prof put the periodic table aside to give us a stern lecture on our future responsibility as chemists. That's about the only thing I remember of the Bhopal disaster, which remains to this day (luckily, in a way) the worst industrial accident ever.

Despite being a responsible chemist and all that, I never looked all that closely at what happened and why, until reading this piece on the 25th anniversary.

Bhopal: 25 years of poison, by Indra Sinha

Reading this, you're left wondering whether the event should have been prosecuted as manslaughter, murder, or genocide, but the fact of the matter is that nobody has been prosecuted to this day. (Essentially, an extremely labile and dangerous substance was stored in a large tank, and somebody decided to switch off the cooling for that tank, to save costs, then water accidentally entered the tank and started a reaction -- there are several outrageously wrong decisions in this story that must not be allowed to happen inside a chemical factory.) And people in the area still ingest the poison and get diseases and birth defects from it.

Chemistry aside, what most angers me about these things is the inherent racism assuming that it's no big deal if 20,000 people die in India from negligence of a US-owned factory, while the deaths of 3,000 people in the US are an outrage that can be used as an excuse to invade two countries (again at the cost of tens of thousands less important lives). Clearly, all men are not created equal ...

with apologies to MC Escher

Somebody very kindly put up a convex mirror in the old entrance hall of the Radcliffe Science Library, which now only gives access to the vending machines and a librarian's office. With its original floor tiles and arches, the setting looks very Escher-like in distorted reflection, so I couldn't resist the temptation to try an Escher-esque self portrait:



With sincere apologies to the master, whose reflections you can find on the official Escher website.

collision course

The Large Hadron Collider is up and running now, after year-long repairs, and producing actual collisions and scientific measurements. And just on time, my review of Paul Halpern's book "Collider" has appeared in this week's edition of Chemistry & Industry (issue 23, p27, restricted online access).

Here's a snippet:

What I found most exciting in this book was the story how physicists came to build bigger and bigger accelerators, ending up with the LHC. There is much to be learned about the nature of human endeavours from this side of the book alone. For example, the fate of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), which was to be built from scratch in a remote part of Texas, until Congress pulled the plug, contrasts with the LHC which is based on using existing CERN infrastructure and recycling as much as possible from previous instruments, and thus could be financed without much pain.

ribosome memories

In the monthly round-up of German pieces, we have my take on the Nobel prize for ribosome structure and function, why Ardi is neither chimp-like nor human, and how to adopt a chemist.

The nobel prize piece was a bit of a nostalgia trip as I was also working with ribosomes in the early 1990s, collaborating with Knud Nierhaus' group at the Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics at Berlin, where Ada Yonath held a visiting professorship at the time. I attended one of the big biannual ribosome meetings in Berlin in 1992 (in the central district that used to be part of the capital of the GDR and in 1992 had more craters than the moon!). I came away with the impression of lots of very bright people feeling their way around in the dark. The crystal structures were really desperately needed, but at that time it was far from clear whether they would ever materialise. Fortunately, around 2000, they did, which is the achievement honoured by this year's Nobel prize in chemistry. And yes, this is chemistry, as the ribosome is nothing but a molecular machine. You can purify the molecular components and assemble a ribosome that has never seen a living cell (and may incorporate synthetic components, or isotope-labelled ones), and it will still work normally. No vital force here, just chemistry.

Anyhow, here are the references:

Adoptieren Sie einen Chemiker, Nachrichten aus der Chemie 57, 1175.

Weder Mensch noch Affe Nachrichten aus der Chemie 57, 1208-1210.

Detailansichten der zellulären Eiweißfabrik, Spektrum der Wissenschaft Nr 12, 16-18.

education for all

It struck me as somewhat ironic that Shakira came to one of the most exclusive universities in the world last night to talk about providing education for all, but then again, the students here will in the future be the people with the power to change things, so I hope they did take the message in.

I didn't get access of course, but the full text of her lecture at the Oxford Union is online here:

The democratization of education.

Essentially, she was saying that the progress of civilisation throughout human history is due to education for more people, so it is in our best interest to make education accessible to all. (which is what her foundation Pies Descalzos is helping to do in Colombia)

Some snippets:

I’m still a student on all these issues, but I’ve come to learn that there are ways to change this. So no government can say that the challenge of bringing education to every child is an impossible task.

Now I want to be clear about this, this isn’t about charity. This is about investing in human potential. From an ethical point of view, from a moral point of view, it accomplishes a purpose. But also from an economic point of view, this could bring enormous benefits to all mankind. Universal education is the key to global security and economic growth.

That is how I want the youth of 2060 to see us. That our mission for global peace consisted of sending 30,000 educators to Afghanistan, not 30,000 soldiers. That in 2010, world education became more important than world domination.

Using my supernatural abilities, I managed to find her after the lecture and got to see her for about 20 seconds (while students took turns to be photographed with her) before she disappeared through the door you see on the right of the less then perfect picture below. Meanwhile, her partner, Antonio de la Rua, was lounging on a sofa just two metres from where I was standing. (I think this is the first time I saw him in RL.)



For better photos of the event, check www.shakira.com, they have now set up a picture gallery.

PS there's also a report in the local newspaper, the Oxford Mail

PPS There is now a ten-minute video with key of the speech available for viewing via the official site.

world cup final

The climate change world cup final has started now, except that we don't get another chance every 4 years on this one.

Showing that international co-operation is possible, fifty newspapers including the Guardian have joined forces to co-publish a joint leader comment today (see this picture gallery).

You can follow the news from Copenhagen on twitter:
http://twitter.com/cop15
http://twitter.com/revkin

Meanwhile, our school has sent us an invitation for children to take part in a ski trip, by plane of course, and with snow guarantee in April 2011, i.e. if they don't have snow they'll make some. Looks like they want to teach the children how to maximise their carbon footprint ... Goes to show that people here in the UK just don't get it.

pigeon-holes

Isn't it reassuring to see that all these new-fangled communication technologies from email to twitter haven't managed to displace the good old-fashioned pigeon holes ? Here in Oxford, everybody needs one at their college plus one at their institute, so there must be many thousands of them. This set of PHs is on Parks Road:

huffing and puffing

A third of a century ago, H. McGurk and J. W. MacDonald published a landmark paper in Nature (Hearing lips and seeing voices, vol. 264, p 746) showing that speech perception is influenced by visual impressions as well, not just by the sound.

Back in 1997, I did an opinion piece for New Scientist exploring the implications of the McGurk effect (as it became known) for the unfortunate tradition of dubbing movies and thus mismatching the auditory and visual signals. In that piece I also mentioned some of the variations on the McGurk experiment done by other researchers, some of which were quite funny, e.g. perceiving speech from inverted faces. I'm still wondering whether the subjects of the study had to stand on their heads.

Last week, Nature published another spin-off, easily summarised as "McGurk effect in air-puffs." Briefly, the authors Bryan Gick And Donald Derrick show for air flow what McGurk and MacDonald showed for vision, namely that it can distort auditory perception. For instance there is a short sharp puff of air in saying "pa", but not in "ba". The paper is on page 502, and a short interview with the first author appears on page 388.

Fortunately, though, all this doesn't affect anybody's enjoyment of movies, unlike the original McGurk effect and the dubbing industry.


PS You can read a "director's cut" version of my 1997 McGurk piece either here or in my recent book The birds, the bees, and the platypuses.

welcome to Hamburg ... errr ... Berlin

If you choose to fly to Germany with a certain orange-tinged budget carrier, you shouldn't be surprised to end up in Berlin when you booked Hamburg. Or in Hamburg when you booked Dortmund. Because the map of Germany that this company uses (at least in their ads, hopefully not for their pilots!) looks like this:



Four cities are definitely wrong, one may be right (hard to tell as Dusseldorf and Cologne are so close to each other, so the line indicating Cologne may be pointing to either), and Munich appears to be vaguely in the right area). I recommend to take the train instead.

speaking at the Oxford Union

Shakira is due to speak to the Oxford Union (members only event) on Monday the seventh. The blurb to the event is basically a summary of her musical success, with no mention of her work in education. I may be wrong, but I'm quite sure that she will use the opportunity to talk about education and her foundations Pies Descalzos, and Alas (see for instance this recent Ibero-American summit). I will have to work it out from the local press though, as I'm not a member and can't get in.



Shakira visiting the Pies Descalzos’ school in Chocó (Colombia) - 2009 (shakira.com)


PS (3.12.) My prediction that she is going to talk about education has now been confirmed by the official website.

copenhagen countdown

Six days to go until the big COP15 meeting at Copenhagen. Quite curious what will come of it, after so much debate beforehand.

In my view, the big problem is that people still don't understand that unlimited economic growth is not compatible with a planet of limited resources. So as long as governments give the environment with one hand and take away with the other in the name of stimulating the economy (UK government approved new runway for LHR airport while pretending care about CO2 emissions!), we're not going to be able to fix things. An economy that only works when it grows like a tumour isn't working at all.

Also, as Naomi Klein pointed out in Rolling Stone Magazine recently, there is much too little appreciation of the fact which she calls the "climate debt", i.e. that the rich countries caused most of the excess CO2 we have, while the poor countries will suffer most from its effects (on both sides of the equation, "most" means over 90%). So the billions due to be paid for climate mitigation aren't aid or charity, they are just fair compensation.

Anyhow. Time to stop ranting and sit back for the final show. In my last pre-Copenhagen piece on climate, out in today's issue of Current Biology, I've tried to make sense of the various political wrestlings surrounding the Barcelona negotiations in November:

Climate jostlings intensify
Current Biology, Volume 19, Issue 22, R1009-R1010, 1 December 2009
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.11.004
abstract and restricted access to PDF file