Wood crafting!

Thank you so much to Stephanie and Jeremy for hosting my trip to Baltimore, Maryland this last week!  We had so much fun with a number of inside jokes ("don't lick that!")...

One of the most fun things we did was stumble upon "Reclaimed by You," where we had the opportunity to make our own high-quality woodcrafts.  I selected some beautiful old poplar from an old Maryland barn that had to be demolished after a flood.  I did not do a good job of documenting the full process, but before I go through the process, let me show you the finished results!

The Process

Select Design, Wood, and Project

Of course your stencil design will depend on the wood and project, and the wood will depend on your stencil design and project!  It's a personal decision, of course.  I wanted something small enough to fit in a grocery bag so I could carry it home on the plane easily enough, and had a small set of designs to select from.  Some of my favorites featured on the site include customization of magnetic and chalk boards, tables, even doors, wall hangings, and this cute wall-mount bottle opener that has a magnetic bottle-cap catcher!

Stain the Wood

As much as I LOVE the look of green poplar, and even skipped the stain on the bed I built last weekend made of it, I decided for this project to give the wood a red tint to match the red in my entry-way to make this the perfect entryway hanging.

Cut the Masking Tape Design

This requires a precision, computer-controlled cutter, or a really good freehand cut with an exacto knife.  We were at a workshop party, so we used pre-cut designs in a masking tape.  On our side, all we had to do was pick out the part of the design we wanted painted.  In this photo you see my stained wood on my right, my design in front of me, and my friend with her project masked by all my activity to my left.

Transfer the Patterned Masking Tape to the Wood

This requires a little bit of skill and some magic tricks...  It's not that hard, actually, there's a decent transfer tape you can buy to lay down over your entire tape pattern, and then roll it all down onto your wood with careful alignment.  It's not that different from using the same technique for making microfluidics, actually, just at a larger scale!

Paint the Un-Masked Regions

This is as easy as loading up a brush and swiping it over the areas you want to paint, and the tape-based stencil does all the hard work of making sure your paint goes only where you want it to go!  You can let it air-dry (the paints available at the workshop dried in about 5 minutes without help, and in about 60 seconds with blow-drying).  I don't have any photos from this step as I was so excited to see my design come together....

Pull up the Tape Mask

This is as easy as it sounds, also, just pull up the tape and watch your design come together!  SO FUN!!

Seal and Varnish

At the workshop, they had a super fast-drying wax-based sealant they used that you could wipe over the entire design and would dry within about 10 minutes under ambient or about 90 seconds with a blow drier.  Again no photos, because I was too absorbed in my work....  but at the end, we got these wonderful products:

Prior to sealant curing, hence the slight blue tint in regions.

My friend's art after completion - she wants to mount hooks in the top and right so that it will be a place for keys and voila wall art + no more lost keys!

My finished project required a couple more steps due to the two-color nature, but it wasn't challenging even for a novice of the technique.  It did require a little more consumption of chocolates, but it came together nicely.

Enjoy the Finished Products!

Here my friend and I are standing in a little photo booth made entirely of reclaimed products, proudly showing off our finished crafts after stumbling into the shop only two hours prior.

Georgia Bill HB 481

This is a guest post from Samuel Holtzen, who earned his bachelors degree from GIT in 2018, has worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and will shortly be starting a PhD Program at UC Boulder.  Future-Dr. Holtzen, in addition to his scientific pursuits, is a musical theatre performer and an advocate for all that is just in the world.

Georgia legislature has passed HB 481, colloquially referred to as "The Heartbeat Act," effectively outlawing abortions after 6 weeks (the typical time to detect a fetal heartbeat). It will go into effect January 1, 2020.

h-hm...

I have a few thoughts.

(As a preface: Contraception is cheap, readily available, and now with medical advances, easy to use. I am of the opinion that contraception should be made available without a prescription upon medical examination, as it is slowly becoming clear that this country cares more about fetuses than actual children (see: the foster care system, universal healthcare, school lunches, child immigrants, Flint’s water crisis, lack of education reform, etc))

The typical time after conception before a pregnancy can be detected in most accessible pregnancy tests is 4 weeks. Most are not detected until well after this. This (ideally) gives the person 2 weeks to make a life-altering decision, assuming they have perfect timing and regular periods.

Once a person, having luckily determined that they are 4 weeks pregnant, decides to seek an abortion, there’s the task of finding places to do it. Privileged individuals with access to healthcare would go to their doctor. Most low-income or uninsurable people do not have this option, in which case they turn to Planned Parenthood. Well, at least they would, but the current administration is pushing to defund Planned Parenthood (HR 369) by 2019. 2020 rolls around, and people suddenly have much fewer options for safe and reliable abortions without doctors. (Anyway, I stand with Planned Parenthood, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Abortions will not stop happening, even if you ban them. Say it with me.

Abortions will not stop happening, even if you ban them. They just become dangerous, poorly executed, and even fatal to the mother. Part of Planned Parenthood existence is to make abortions safe, available, and as smooth as possible for women whose lives have been turned upside down.

“Sam,” you may ask, “why don’t pregnant women just take a little road trip to another state and get an abortion?”

My answer is twofold.

1. This assumes the means of the pregnant person. To those with privilege, this may be as simple as jumping in a car and driving somewhere else. If you don’t have a car, rely on public transit, work two jobs seven days a week, or are otherwise tethered to Georgia, you’re shit outta luck.

2. In the previous versions, there’s this fun little provision, at the end, real sneaky-like, where the legislators added that the abortion of the fetus, outside of any exceptions —medical or otherwise— would be akin to homicide and carry the weight of second degree murder (equivalent to 10-20 years in prison). This is no longer in the final version of the bill, but the fact that it was in there at all is frankly terrifying.

You made it this far, so I’m issuing a call to action:

Write your senators. Listen to your candidate’s platform. Don’t look at party, look at ethics and track record. Vote. And for God sakes, be kind to each other.

Information Literacy: Evaluate your sources and ID fake news Part 1

This series of posts comes out of a class I learned to teach while working with my good friend and colleague Dr. Vera Theil at Tokyo Metropolitan University.  It turns out the class was good for me, and perhaps my lecture was not as needed by our students as by those in my generation and older.  It seems modern college students, who grew up with the internet, are really good at evaluating false stories and fake news, but are a little weak against confirmation bias in identifying, using, and understanding information.  I thought it handy to break this down, so if you are interested in validating your own news sources, scroll down!

First: What is "Information Literacy?"

Literacy (from Webster): competence or knowledge in a specified area

Information literacy comes down to these five core competencies:

• identify needed information
• access information effectively & efficiently
• evaluate information
• use information appropriately
• understand information related issues

In this first post, I want to focus on the "evaluate" line.  I hope to convert all five of these points into short blogs over the next month or two, but if we start here hopefully it will be useful to a couple people!

Why can't I just Google and trust what I find?

Image credit: Link

This should seem laughably obvious to most, but we fall victim to this time and time again. Here are a couple vignettes for why you can't just automatically trust the top hits returned to you by Google....

Wikipedia is Created by Real Humans

For this one, see this post

Google (And Any Other Search Server) Saves Your Search Data

This is a particularly insidious issue.  Let me expound.  I was attempting to find a legitimate source against supporting man-made climate change.  All my searches returned stuff like this:

Yeah, pick on my search terms, I just wanted a quick example to show you.  At the time, I tried really hard for about 2 hours with all possible search terms.

In order to find the article needed, I had to download a new internet browser.  I have, in other words, trained Google and other search servers that I only respond positively to content that reinforces my "bias" that climate change not only exists but is man-made.
Digression: link to come

This means that everyone, everywhere, has trained their own internet experience to provide content that reinforces their bias, making it, eventually, exceptionally challenging to access content that challenges those biases.  Few, if any of us, realize that it is happening to us, because as we do more internet searches and respond to more content, we continue to train the system and continue to interact with content that "makes sense" to us.  We don't see a problem with our own world, but we do observe a problem with other people.  "They have access to the same information as I do, how could they possibly come to a polar opposite conclusion?" we ask.  It turns out we aren't getting the same information, and they, via a number of decisions in browsing history, have trained their information gathering systems to give them results that are probably telling them the opposite of what yours tell you.

Why Should I Care About Evaluating my Sources?

Not Every Retweet / Shared Post that Seems Informative is Legitimate for Its Purpose

Here's a poignant example.  This is a tweet obviously showing horrible things being done to a number of cats (and I love cats now, probably been infected, as my cat-loving started only after caring for a couple of them):

How horrible is that?  So many poor cats laid out on operating tables, tied down, having their life, liberty, and happiness ripped from them.  If you don't retweet this, you are a horrible example of humanity and everything we've worked against as a society.

Well, here's a link to the true story.  Those cats were taken in from a hoarding situation, and are being tested for rabies, etc... being spayed / neutered, and being treated for diseases coming from their horrible living conditions, all to enhance their adoption potential.  There were 697 cats living on the premises, which was described as the largest cat-hoarding case in the nation.  A little less than 10% (about 60) had to be euthanized due to the extent of their illnesses, with many more needing treatment for ringworm, mouth infections, etc...  In other words, your knee-jerk reaction to share / retweet that post would've been misled and misleading, because the photo is NOT from animal testing but instead an image of people trying desperately to rehome a very large number of cats all at once, many who were quite ill.

Not Every Anecdotal Experience Is Representative

People are people wherever you go, and we're really bad as a species separating "this one thing happened to my aunt's husband's friend's sister" from "this will happen to me."  Here's why this works:
My aunt's husband's friend's sister ate the berries of something that looked like that plant, and she died.
The woman in question in this example sampled nightshade, which is related to tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant, which we can all verify are quite tasty members of the non-toxic vegetable arena.  However, when moving into new regions and determining edibility vs toxicity of new flora and fauna, our ancestors HAD to rely on this kind of anecdotal evidence.  Are you going to believe Grunt when he said his aunt's husband's friend's sister died from eating it, or do you want to test it on a member of your own family?  Yeah, you're going to go with Grunt's anecdotal evidence, because why risk it?

Black Nightshade.  Image credit: Link

However, if we as a species went only with anecdotal evidence, we wouldn't have tomatoes, peppers, or eggplant.

Image credit: Link

Obviously we must be capable of rising above this bias!  It's made more challenging in the modern era because we have instant access to whatever happened to Grunt's aunt's husband's friend's sister via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc....  Also, we may or may not know it, but Grunt's aunt's husband's friend is a pathological liar and doesn't even have a sister.  How do we parse that possibility while accepting her knowledge for the good of our community?

More to come:

Given that we have at our fingertips access to endless knowledge, but also infinite random musings of individual humans who we may or may not trust (turns out that Grunt's aunt's husband's friend is a real piece of work and you can't trust a thing he says), it turns out to still be somewhat easy to figure out what you can base decisions on, and what you can't.  This series of blog posts attempts to take you through it in a short piece-by-piece manner, so you easily tell the difference between Grunt's aunt's husband's friend and someone with true, honest information.

Someone on the internet is WRONG!!

Image courtesy of https://xkcd.com/386/

We've all been there.  Someone on the internet is WRONG and we just need to correct them, or perhaps we just found some new "fact" on the internet and all our friends are WRONG.

Here are a couple short vignettes from my own experience how someone was WRONG on the internet....

Vignette #1: Wikipedia can be edited by anyone

Because Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, at any time, major falsehoods have a relatively short lifetime on the site, but relatively minor errors can persist for a very long time.

Story #1: A Major, but Hilarious, Wikipedia Error

For one example of a major falsehood, I am reminded of a time I looked up "grapes" on Wikipedia - I was looking for various varietals and hoping one would be excellent for my California container garden.  Apparently the perfect container garden grape varietal does not exist (have confirmed via direct experimentation), but the Wikipedia article that day had this brilliant and whimsical story about the Grape Battles of Sicily (~4000 BC).  In the story, on Wikipedia in 2008, the grape people had tired of having the flesh of their people eaten by the Sicilians, and organized a massive revolt.  They pulled in the grape peoples from surrounding areas, including a large swath of Europe, and mounted  an attack.  After a long and gruesome war, lasting 12 years, the Sicilians fought back the grape peoples.  To commemorate their victory, Sicilians began a horrific annual tradition of rounding up grapes, stomping on their corpses, collecting the blood and drinking it.  The tradition quickly spread across Europe and into Asia where the blood of rice was substituted for grapes as they had their own Rice Wars to contend with.  Few know the tragic history of the Grape Battles of Sicily, and continue to consume the blood of the grapes (wine) and the rice (sake) without understanding the violence they are supporting in doing so.  #FreeTheGrapes #FreeTheRice

I later tried to capture that perfect moment of Wikipedia gone wild, but only an hour later when I realized the brilliance I had witnessed, it was too late.  Someone had already edited the page, and I was too naive to know to check the edit history at that point in order to capture it.  Please understand - it was such a smooth transition from "real fact" to "whimsical" that no one could identify the exact moment when it ran off the rails.  It was glorious and I am so sorry you cannot witness the art of that writer.

Story #2: A Minor, but Problematic Wikipedia Error

Around the same time as I learned of the great Grape Wars of 4000 BC, I was working on the analysis of aldehydes and ketones, and an easy substrate we had in the lab was fermented beverages.  These weren't for the drinking - a prior grad student and postdoc had done an analysis of these for neurotoxic amines.  The overall study showed that there were relatively high levels of acetoin and diacetyl in the big, bold, buttery California chardonnays, high levels of histamine in fermented rice wine beverages, elevated levels of tyramine in red wines that had undergone malolactic fermentation, and high levels of acetaldehyde in sherries and ports. 

Digression: What does all that mean for a non chemist?  Well, acetoin and diacetyl are responsible for the buttery aroma and flavor you may associate with a good California chardonnay, and are also occasionally used by certain venues to entice you to visit their pretzel stands in shopping malls or the popcorn booth at movie theaters.  As natural byproducts of fermentation, they stand as major off flavors in beer production.  Histamine is a neurotoxic amine implicated in the natural immune response, hence anti-histamine drugs have a high capital in the combat against allergic response.  Tyramine is also a neurotoxic amine, responsible for a hypertensive response in sensitized individuals, leading to headache, heart palpitations, etc.. with potential side effects including stroke and heart attack, even after only one glass of wine, with a majority of problematic symptoms arising approximately 6 hours after consumption.  Acetaldehyde is the primary initial by-product of mammalian metabolism of ethanol, and is frequently blamed for all the deleterious symptoms of the "hangover."

Another compound we found in ALL fermented beverages was formaldehyde.  At the time, Wikipedia had a line item that said that formaldehyde was banned for sale in the EU under REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorization, and restriction of Chemical substances).  This wasn't actually true, and looking into the sources cited revealed that the initial citation was a blog post by an embalmer incited against the idea that they would either have to continue working with formaldehyde or give up its use (there were so many posts in this ring of blog posts that I can't remember any longer who was the first).  A co-author on my study was certain that there was a ban against ANY formaldehyde in the EU, and demanded that we discuss it in the write-up of our results.  This would be particularly relevant for one of the sherries analyzed, which had its origin in Spain.  However, the claim that there was a blanket ban on sale or transport of formaldehyde in the EU was simply false.  I downloaded the legalese and highlighted relevant sections.  I got confirmation via e-mail to EU officials that there was no ban.  I was told that I was just being lazy and not looking hard enough....  I finally edited the Wikipedia page myself to update it with my research.  I used my real name when I did so, and an e-mail associated with the university I worked with at the time.  However, the problem suddenly dissipated and we finally submitted for publication. 

YOU, my friend, have the capability to check Wikipedia's sources, and correct them if they are wrong.  You can also edit it to include the Great Grape Wars of Sicily.  If you do, please drop me an e-mail because that was really a highlight of my life on the internet.

Please realize that the levels of formaldehyde measured were exceptionally low!  Prior to attaining a level of formaldehyde exposure advised against by the World Health Organization you would have to consume enough sherry to be 3.5x the LD50 (lethal dose for 50 percent of the population) of WATER.  If you intend to drink that much sherry, you have much larger problems than formaldehyde.