Singin’ in the Hail

Posted May 19, 2012 by Nicole Yunger Halpern

Updated May 19, 2012 at 03:20 PM

Lancaster, the UK city whose dialect flummoxed me last December, hailed on me this evening.

Hoping to admire the sunset, I sallied forth from work into a driving wind. The wind pummeled me with hailstones like a middle-school bully with taunts. Though I’ll keep suppressing my memories of middle-school taunts, I didn’t mind the hail. Because you know what helps one appreciate hail?

Near-freezing rain. Which Lancaster dumped on me this morning.

Hoping to taste the fresh air, I sallied forth from home into a downpour. The downpour pounded my umbrella like a real-estate agent pounding a physicist at Monopoly. Though I avoid challenging real-estate agents to Monopoly, I didn’t mind the downpour. Because who needs sunshine when sampling a potpourri of precipitations?

Growing up in Florida, I encountered no precipitation less mundane than rain. And Florida Humidity, which has enough body to earn it not only precipitation status, but also capitalization and a Social Security Number. The hailstorm that punctuated my childhood lasted twenty minutes. Having pirouetted through a ballet class during the spectacle, I regretted missing it.

Regret needles me no longer. Lancaster offers not only mundane rain and humidity—not only near-freezing rain and hail—but also freezing rain and Insta-Melt Snow (“Solid enough to arouse snow-angel dreams, but melts on contact!”).

Not converted to the cult of cloudiness? Consider my bedroom window. That window doesn’t face westward. But if it did, you might ask, “Do you enjoy watching the sun set?” I’d reply, “I can’t watch the sun set, because clouds cover the sun. But what clouds they are! What rain they promise! What a feast for the eyes, the ears, the skin, the sweatshirt pressed into rain-jacket duty!”

Perhaps I celebrate rain to console myself. When Google offered me buttons purported to change the weather this April Fools’ Day, I growled, “Don’t tempt me.” But we’re told, if life hands you lemons, make lemonade. If the sky hands you rain, start singin’ in it. If I hand you an umbrella as a souvenir from Lancaster, you’ll understand why.

If I hand you an umbrella, moreover, thank me for not bringing one souvenir more characteristic of Lancaster: near-freezing rain.

The author wrote this article approximately one month ago. Though May hasn’t hailed on her (yet), it prohibits her from leaving home sans hat, scarf, gloves, coat, and at least one sweater.

“Think Out Loud” Fans Don’t Break Science

Posted Apr 13, 2012 by Nicole Yunger Halpern

Updated Apr 13, 2012 at 08:12 AM

An orange space suit stands in the lobby. Photos of planets and stars ring the auditorium. My eyes bulge as I shake hands with a scientific bigwig whose discipline’s name contains six syllables.

Welcome to NASA headquarters.

This March, NASA hosted the science-communication competition “Famelab Astrobiology DC.” Famelab, a UK organization, challenges young scientists throughout the world to explain their research to the public. Representing Famelab in the United States, NASA requested three-minute speeches about astrobiology—the study, according to a NASA webpage, of “the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe.”

I do not specialize in astronomy or biology.

While others ponder life on Mars, I erase algebra errors. While others wave illustrations of galaxies that spiral like soft-serve ice cream, I clutch notebooks filled with pencil smudges. While the names of others’ specialties zing with adrenaline—“astro”-this and “exo”-that—mine murmurs, “theoretical physics.”

Lacking a prefix, my research might not wow stargazers. But that research fits in a knapsack. So I packed a notebook, pencil, and eraser; hopped a plane to NASA headquarters; and yakked for three minutes about evolution.

A primordial soup has evolved into fungi, ferns, foxes, and fans of the Tampa Tribune’s “Think Out Loud” blog. Four billion years ago, carbon, hydrogen, and other atoms frisked about on Earth. Today, atoms have fixed positions in molecules and cells. According to normal people, the atoms’ disorderliness has decreased. According to physicists, the atoms’ “entropy” has decreased.

A physical law decrees that isolated systems’ entropies tend to increase, that disorderliness grows. Atoms, the law seems to imply, should not bind together: Life should not evolve, and “Think Out Loud” should have no fans.

But living systems do not remain isolated. As atoms bind into molecules, they release energy that feeds air particles. Once energized, the particles zoom around like drunk clowns. Similarly, the fatty membranes that enclose cells form in water. When membranes form, water’s electric fields go haywire. While organizing living systems, evolution disorders the systems with which organisms interact. Because evolution disorders more than it orders, life can evolve without contradicting physics. Your existence doesn’t break the scientific law.

Want to know more? Check out these two three-minute speeches about evolution and entropy. Don’t let any space suits or photos distract you: While some science looks no more impressive than pencil smudges, it impresses no less than that crown of evolution, the blog reader.

Application Acrobatics

Posted Mar 19, 2012 by Nicole Yunger Halpern

Updated Mar 19, 2012 at 04:57 PM

I expect graduate school to frustrate me until I want to rip out every hair in my head—but to teach me loads. Building the undergraduate transcripts I sent to grad schools frustrated me until I wanted to snap every pencil in my desk—but taught me loads.

I never expected the formatting of undergrad transcripts for grad schools to frustrate me until I raged against scanners and computers and technological progress.

But applying to grad schools has taught me loads.

My technological Troy arose nine months ago, when Application Two demanded a pdf of my transcripts. (Application One requested a paper copy, during what I term “the good old days.”) About eight times out of nine, my scanner ingested just a page’s lower right-hand corner. The scanner ingested the entire page the ninth time, seducing me out of quitting. Since my transcript reported that I’d studied psychology, since psychology students study addiction, and since my scanner threatened to hook me like a slot machine, I drove to FedEx Office.

FedEx Office’s scanners worked, mostly. After returning home, I learned that they’d rotated every page by ninety degrees. I learned that Adobe Acrobat could rotate the pages back, that I owned Adobe Reader, and that Reader is not Acrobat. I returned to FedEx Office.

Between subsequent trips, I learned that different schools require different formats. Some schools accept only files smaller than 2 MB. Some demand that all transcripts occupy the same file; some require that different schools’ transcripts occupy different files; some require that each page occupy a different pdf. One school demanded that I chop my transcript into chunks. The chunk size demanded by the admissions office differed from the chunk size demanded by the physics department.

I learned that drivers wait an average of two minutes at a traffic light near FedEx Office. After learning that two minutes can feel like eons, I learned, while waiting, NPR’s program schedule.

Twelve applications later, I moved to Lancaster, UK. The armory of pdfs I carried would satisfy the final four schools, wouldn’t it?

Of course not.

So I learned that FedEx Office has not invaded Lancaster; that I can’t access Acrobat at my local library or at my university’s library, physics department, or tech center; that Acrobat costs a pile of loot; and that my Mac can’t run Adobe’s free Acrobat trial.

As I prepared to hoist the white flag, someone mentioned that the program Preview resembles Acrobat. I owned Preview.

Perseverance, we’re told, is a virtue. Perseverance sustained that ancient Greek runner who ran the first marathon—the man who zipped from city to city, requesting an army’s help, delivering the army’s reply, and reporting a battle’s outcome.

He died of exhaustion.

If you run a marathon, prepare to fight. If you apply to grad schools, prepare to learn. If you standardize formats throughout the admissions world, I will pour libations in your honor.

And if you need a cheery face at the New Tampa FedEx Office, ask for Jessie.

Chemistry for Valentines

Posted Feb 14, 2012 by Nicole Yunger Halpern

Updated Feb 14, 2012 at 04:01 AM

To break up the conversational monotony last week, instead of discussing physics with a colleague, I discussed chemistry. Having just watched “My Week with Marilyn,” Simon Curtis’s 2011 film about a production assistant’s romance with Marilyn Monroe, I admired the actors.

So-and-so and such-and-such, I commented, have good chemistry.

What did I mean? asked my colleague, a non-native English speaker.

Had he encountered the phrase “chemistry between people”? He shook his head. If Michelle Williams, who played Monroe, and Eddie Redmayne, who played the production assistant, share sympathy— convey harmony, demonstrate that they understand each other—they have good chemistry.

Actors can’t have chemistry, my colleague protested, unless they have romantic feelings for each other. When you fall in love, hormones flood your bloodstream. Actors can’t release those chemicals without experiencing romance.

I didn’t mean that the actors opened each other’s endocrine glands like kitchen faucets, I replied. I couldn’t comment on the chemistry in the actors without testing their blood. I saw chemistry between the actors.

My colleague narrowed his eyes. Without having chemicals, people can’t have chemistry.

But English speakers describe relationships in terms of chemistry without considering chemicals.

You must have misheard these English speakers, my colleague said.

I misheard all these uses of “chemistry” throughout 22 years of listening to conversations and reading movie reviews?

You misheard.

Perhaps, I mused later, the phrase “chemistry between people” evolved from recognition of the chemicals released in certain couples who share chemistry. Perhaps the phrase’s source remains as mysterious as the source of chemistry between people.

Perhaps physicists should leave chemistry to chemists.

Physicists have had greater success studying electromagnetism, the sub-field of physics devoted to light.

Anyone smell an application to “flying sparks”?

The North-by-Northwest Path to Truth

Posted Jan 29, 2012 by Nicole Yunger Halpern

Updated Jan 29, 2012 at 06:09 AM

This past autumn, Wall Street Journal writers contracted Creative Analogy Disease (CAD). In every weekend Review section, one book-writer offered insights into wordsmithing. The column that hosted their work, The Writing Life, spotlighted juxtaposition, humor, endings…and misrepresented scientific ideas.

Between August 27 and November 27, four Writing Life guests explained writing-related concepts via analogies with scientific concepts. An analogy clarifies an unfamiliar idea by highlighting its similarities to a familiar idea. By guiding readers into unknown territory, an analogy resembles the Disney film “Beauty and the Beast,” which introduced me to selfishness, cruelty, and slavering wolves through song and dance. Science analogies convey the universe’s expansion in terms of balloons, string theory in terms of worms, and other mind-bogglers in terms of the humdrum. By elucidating everyday concepts like humor in scientific terms, the Writing Life guests inverted the science-analogy paradigm. “More power to them!” I’d cry—if these Creative Analogy Disease victims (CADs) understood the science they shanghaied.

Consider, as an example, Steve Almond’s November 5th article “Wisecracks as Wisdom.” Cracking the nut that is humor, Mr. Almond reveals the kernel of what tickles us. “[C]haracters make us laugh,” he explains, “because they tell us the truth at a velocity that exceeds our normal standards of insight.” When startled, we giggle. Characters shock us into laughing, Mr. Almond argues, by unmasking the nature of suffering.

Suffering rarely tweaks my funny bone. Still, Mr. Almond’s conclusion puzzles me less than his reference to velocity does. To untangle his meaning, let’s consider Holden Caulfield.

Mr. Almond portrays Holden, the star of J.D. Salinger’s coming-of-age novel The Catcher in the Rye, as a hilarious docent in the museum of suffering. Holden’s favorite teacher betrays him, his baby sister grows up too quickly, and he feels powerless to protect his childhood sweetheart from a lustful friend. What does Mr. Almond mean when writing that, by describing these challenges, Holden “tell[s] us the truth at a velocity that exceeds our normal standards of insight”?

By definition, Holden’s velocity consists of his speed and the direction in which he moves. His speed is the rate at which his position changes. Since Mr. Almond invokes speed metaphorically, let’s stretch our definition of speed. Instead of measuring speed only in terms of distance traveled per unit time—as in miles per hour—let’s measure Holden’s speed in terms of the units of truth he reveals per hour of his life.

Holden packs a zoo of activities, from a rumble with a roommate to the paying of a prostitute, into the day he shares with readers. Into a standard day, I pack only a commute, a trip to the grocery, and studies into the fundamental nature of reality (physics). Holden reveals more units of truth per hour of his life than I discover per hour of my life. In Mr. Almond’s terms, Holden tells the truth at a speed that exceeds my normal standards of insight.

How can we describe the non-speed component of Holden’s velocity, the direction in which he moves? Perhaps Holden makes a beeline for truth, while I zigzag across the Hills of Haziness. Just as we stretched our definition of “speed” to accommodate metaphors, we might stretch our definition of “direction.” But the latter definition rips like a teddy bear in a tug-of-war when yanked by Mr. Almond. Writing that Holden “tell[s] the truth at a velocity that exceeds our normal standards of insight,” Mr. Almond implies not only that Holden’s speed exceeds our speed, but also that his direction exceeds our direction. Does Mr. Almond mean that, if I discover truth north-by-northwest, Holden reveals truth northward? Mr. Almond’s claim makes little sense.

Because “velocity” contains more syllables than “speed,” it sounds more erudite. Pity that sense doesn’t accompany this apparent erudition. Mr. Almond would have benefited from researching velocity, although I cheer his interweaving of science with literature.

At least his error bakes a casserole for thought: I love the idea of approaching truth north-by-northwest. If you find a compass that points toward truth, do let me know.